Ringfort (Rath), Pallas, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Pallas, Co. Cork

A circular patch of pasture on a west-facing slope above the Blackwater River holds considerably more history than its modest appearance suggests.

The earthwork here was levelled around the 1980s, yet the site has not entirely disappeared. A slightly raised circular area, roughly 52 metres across, remains visible on the ground, defined by a low scarp of about half a metre. To the south and west, the old external fosse, a defensive ditch that once ringed the enclosure, still betrays itself through a differential pattern in the grass growth. A concentration of small stones is scattered across the interior, and a 1986 aerial photograph captured the whole outline as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly circular impression that dry summers periodically reveal across Irish fields.

The site appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842, 1905, and 1936, each time as a hachured roughly circular enclosure of around 45 metres in diameter, the later editions adding a solid line around the hachures. When Bowman recorded it in 1934, the ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland typically consisting of a raised interior platform ringed by one or more earthen banks, still retained a bank of about four feet in height, with a diameter close to 42 yards. Even then the fosse had been infilled and the interior raised above the surrounding ground. That interior, Bowman noted, had been used as a children's burial ground, one of many such informal graveyards found within old ringforts across Ireland, where unbaptised infants were interred outside consecrated ground. A standing stone in the north-east quadrant and a possible souterrain in the north-west add further layers to a site that, for all its apparent plainness, was clearly a place of some local significance across several centuries.

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