Ringfort (Rath), Dunbeacon, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Dunbeacon, Co. Cork

The gravel ridge at Dunbeacon, on the Mizen Peninsula in west Cork, once held a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, one of the circular enclosed farmsteads that were built in their thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period.

What makes this particular example worth noting is precisely that it no longer exists, or at least not in any recognisable form. The area where it stood was known locally as "fort field", a name that preserved the memory of the monument even as the land around it was being stripped away.

During gravel-quarrying in the 1960s, workers uncovered a souterrain beneath what had been the fort field. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, typically stone-lined, built in association with a ringfort and used variously for storage, refuge, or both. Alongside the souterrain, the quarrying turned up human bones and quernstones. Quernstones are the paired grinding stones used to mill grain by hand, and their presence alongside a burial context, however disturbed, hints at a site with a long domestic and perhaps funerary history. The quarrying that revealed these finds also destroyed the ridge on which the rath had stood, removing the earthwork itself along with whatever else the ground still held.

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