Ringfort (Rath), Killavoy, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
On a south-south-westerly slope of Mount Hillary in north Cork, a faint circular rise in the pasture is almost all that remains of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was once a clearly defined earthwork enclosure.
Ringforts were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch surrounding a farmstead or dwelling. This one, roughly thirty metres across, now announces itself only as a low swell in the ground, barely forty centimetres high at its most prominent.
The site appeared on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in 1842, again in 1904, and once more in 1938, each time rendered as a hachured circular enclosure, the cartographic convention used to indicate an earthwork with raised banks. For nearly a century, then, it was a legible feature of the landscape, persistent enough to be mapped across three separate surveys. Sometime around 1965, according to local information, it was levelled, most likely as part of agricultural improvement. What survives is the ghost of that earlier form, a nearly circular area measuring thirty metres north to south and just under thirty metres east to west, enclosed by that residual low rise where the original bank once stood.