Ringfort (Rath), Skahanagh Beg, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Skahanagh Beg, Co. Cork

Beneath a dense cover of conifer plantation in West Cork, a raised earthen platform sits atop a drumlin, its early medieval geometry largely obscured by twentieth-century forestry.

The platform, measuring roughly 38.5 metres north to south and 37.3 metres east to west, rises nearly three metres above the surrounding pasture, which gives some sense of the effort that went into its original construction. A rath is an earthen ringfort, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically associated with a single farming family or minor lord and dating broadly to the period between the sixth and tenth centuries. This one retains its enclosing bank on the western to north-north-eastern arc, an external fosse, which is essentially a defensive ditch roughly a metre deep, and a counterscarp bank, the raised lip of earth thrown up on the outer edge of that ditch. The entrance faces north-north-east and is just over four metres wide, with a causeway crossing the fosse.

The site sits on a drumlin, one of those smooth, egg-shaped hills deposited by glacial activity, which would have made it naturally prominent in the landscape even before any earthworks were added. By 1998, the researcher Myler noted that the ringfort had become heavily planted with dense coniferous trees, a fate that overtook many such sites during the twentieth-century afforestation drives across Ireland. The planting makes it harder to read the earthworks clearly on the ground, though the underlying structure, with its platform, ditch, and double bank, appears to survive in reasonable condition beneath the canopy.

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