Ringfort (Rath), Tullig, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tullig, Co. Cork

Beneath a crop field on a west-facing slope in Tullig, Co. Cork, lies what was once a rath, a type of circular earthwork enclosure used as a farmstead or settlement during early medieval Ireland.

It is there only on paper now, its banks long since levelled to make way for tillage, leaving nothing visible at ground level for anyone who might pass through the field today.

The ringfort's existence is known largely because of its appearance on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it was recorded as a hachured circular enclosure of approximately 35 metres in diameter. Hachuring, the use of short radiating lines to indicate raised earthworks on early maps, was a standard cartographic convention of the period, and its presence here confirms that the ringfort's banks were still standing, or at least discernible, at the time of the survey. Ringforts of this size are common across Cork and the wider Irish landscape, numbering in the tens of thousands nationally, and most date to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. They typically enclosed a family's dwelling, outbuildings, and sometimes animals, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. This particular example has not survived above ground. By the time it was catalogued in any detail, it had already been absorbed into agricultural land, its circular outline erased by repeated ploughing.

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