Ringfort (Rath), Kilcanway, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilcanway, Co. Cork

There is nothing to see at Kilcanway.

That is, in a sense, precisely what makes it worth knowing about. A ringfort once stood here in the pasture of north Cork, a circular earthen enclosure of around twenty-two metres in diameter, and today it has vanished so completely that it leaves no visible trace on the ground whatsoever.

A rath, as this type of monument is sometimes called, was a raised earthen bank enclosing a roughly circular area, typically used as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. Thousands were built across the country, and many survive in good condition. This one did not. The earliest cartographic evidence for it comes from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it appears as a hachured circular enclosure, the hachuring being the fine radiating lines surveyors used to indicate an earthen bank or raised feature. By the time modern fieldwork was carried out, it had been levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural improvement at some point after that mid-nineteenth-century survey captured it.

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