Ringfort (Rath), Lackendarragh, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lackendarragh, Co. Cork

Most ringforts announce themselves with a raised earthen bank, a visible hollow, some disruption in the land that catches the eye even from a distance.

The one at Lackendarragh offers none of that. The site has been completely levelled, leaving no surface trace whatsoever, and the only reason we know it existed at all is a detail on a map made by the Ordnance Survey in 1842, where it appears as a hachured subcircular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter on a west-facing slope above the Duvglasha River.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were used as farmsteads and homesteads, and tens of thousands of them are thought to have existed across the country. The Lackendarragh example sat on pasture ground overlooking the river, and its southern side may have been formed, or at least partly defined, by a curved field boundary that could indicate the enclosure was truncated on that side even before it disappeared entirely. That same field boundary, a linear earthen bank about a metre high, still survives today, now skirted by a farm laneway. It is, in effect, the last physical remnant of a structure that otherwise exists only in cartographic memory.

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