Ringfort (Rath), Knockanroe, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
Tucked into a north-facing slope at Knockanroe in County Cork, this ringfort quietly resists easy reading.
What looks at first like a straightforward ring of earthworks turns out, on closer inspection, to include a curious stone-lined hollow in the northern bank, roughly two and a half metres across and less than a metre high, opening outward into the fosse. The best current thinking is that it may be the remains of a limekiln, a small structure used to burn limestone and produce quicklime for agricultural or building purposes, though the identification remains tentative.
The fort itself follows the rath form, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Here, a roughly circular area about thirty metres across is enclosed not by a single bank but by two concentric earthen banks separated by a fosse, the ditch that runs between them. A further shallow fosse is visible to the east, south-east, and south. The inner bank reaches its greatest height to the east, standing about 1.3 metres internally, while it diminishes considerably as it curves around to the north-west. The entrance, a gap of just over three metres wide, faces roughly north-east, and a corresponding break in the outer bank lines up with it. That outer bank, standing 1.6 metres high, has been absorbed into the existing field boundary system along its north-western and north-north-eastern arc, a fate common to many such monuments, which were simply too convenient to ignore when farmers were laying out their land. The interior has been left to overgrow, and the northern side of the interior has been built up to level out the natural fall of the hillside, a small but telling sign of the practical engineering that went into these enclosures.