Ringfort (Rath), Farrangeel, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Farrangeel, Co. Cork

Some places survive only as marks on old paper.

The ringfort at Farrangeel in north Cork exists today as precisely nothing, a stretch of pasture at the base of a west-facing slope that gives no indication it was ever anything else. The earthwork has been fully levelled, leaving no visible surface trace, which places it in the quietly melancholy category of sites known only because somebody mapped or recorded them before the ground was cleared.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or defended settlement during the early medieval period in Ireland. The Farrangeel example appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, rendered as a hachured circular enclosure of roughly thirty metres in diameter, which is a fairly modest example of the type. A researcher named Bowman, writing in 1934, noted a single-ramparted fort of approximately twenty-nine yards across on land then belonging to a Mrs. O'Riordan, and this is almost certainly the same feature. Between that 1934 reference and the 1842 map depiction, there is a reasonable outline of what was once here, even if the ground itself has long since been put to agricultural use and smoothed over entirely.

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