Ringfort (Rath), Ballynahalisk, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballynahalisk, Co. Cork

On a south-facing slope in Ballynahalisk, a near-perfect circle of coniferous trees marks the outline of an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that once served as the dwelling and working space of a farming family, likely sometime between the sixth and tenth centuries.

The trees now fill the interior and crown the earthen bank, so the enclosure reads less as an archaeological feature than as an oddly deliberate plantation, a ring of conifers sitting in open pasture with no obvious explanation unless you know what you are looking at.

The site is a rath, the earthen variety of ringfort, built up from a roughly circular bank of compacted soil and defined on the south-eastern side by an external fosse, a shallow defensive ditch, still measurable at around half a metre deep. The enclosure itself is almost exactly circular, measuring twenty-three metres east to west and twenty-two metres north to south, with the bank rising about forty centimetres on its interior face and sixty centimetres on the outside. It is a modest example of the form, but a well-preserved one. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1905, and 1935 all record it as a hachured circular enclosure in the corner of a field, the conventional cartographic shorthand for a raised or embanked feature. The field boundaries that once enclosed it have since been removed, leaving the ringfort sitting in open pasture, more exposed than it would have been for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Pete F
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