Ringfort (Rath), Faunmore, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Faunmore, Co. Cork

On the eastern shoulder of a low hillock in Faunmore, a nearly circular enclosure sits in pasture, its interior still faintly ridged by cultivation furrows that run on a north-south axis.

Those parallel ridges are a quiet puzzle: they predate or postdate the settlement, or perhaps both, suggesting that this patch of ground has been worked and reworked across very different periods of human use.

The enclosure is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland. Typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, raths were the farmsteads of farming families, enclosed for livestock management and a degree of security. This one measures approximately 27.8 metres north to south and 29.5 metres east to west. Its boundary is a scarp, essentially a cut or shaped earthen face, standing about two metres high, with a low internal bank surviving along a short stretch to the south-east. Atop the scarp, a stone wall continues in two arcs, running from the south-south-west around to the north-west and from the north around to the north-east. To the west, a gap about 2.1 metres wide marks what was almost certainly the original entrance. Outside the enclosure to the north-west, a shallow external fosse, a ditch dug to reinforce the boundary, survives to a depth of around 0.4 metres, enough to suggest its outline without being especially dramatic on the ground.

The combination of earthen scarp, stone walling, and external ditch points to a site that was modified or maintained over time rather than built in a single phase. The cultivation ridges crossing the interior add another layer, indicating that at some point the enclosed space was ploughed or spaded into ridge and furrow, a method associated with lazy-bed potato cultivation in later centuries. The result is a site that layers early medieval enclosure and post-medieval farming into a single, unassuming field.

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