Ringfort (Rath), Cahermee, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
There is nothing to see at this site in Cahermee, and that, in its way, is precisely what makes it interesting.
The ringfort that once occupied this east-facing slope in north County Cork has been levelled entirely, swallowed by tillage agriculture at some point in the past, leaving no earthwork, no bank, no visible trace whatsoever on the ground. What remains is essentially a ghost, detectable only from the air, where the buried outline of the enclosure shows up as a cropmark, the differential growth of plants above a filled bank and its external fosse betraying the shape of what was once there.
The site has a quietly puzzling cartographic history. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1842, its six-inch sheet recorded the enclosure as a roughly sub-square shape, which is unusual for a ringfort, a type of early medieval enclosed farmstead that typically takes a circular or oval form. By the time the OS returned for its revisions in 1906 and again in 1937, the depicted shape had changed to a circle of approximately 45 metres in diameter, suggesting either that the earlier survey was imprecise, that the surviving earthwork had been partly reduced in the intervening decades, or simply that different surveyors interpreted the same degraded feature differently. A ringfort is essentially a raised circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a defended homestead during the early medieval period in Ireland. This one sits on a slope about 100 metres east of a larger, bivallate ringfort, meaning one defended by two concentric banks and ditches, which occupies the crest of the hill above it. The proximity of two such sites is not unusual; ringforts often appear in clusters within a landscape, reflecting patterns of family landholding and settlement.
For a visitor, there is little reward in trying to locate the precise spot. The aerial cropmark exists in photographic archives, but on the ground the site is farmland with nothing to distinguish it. The interest lies less in any physical encounter and more in what the cartographic discrepancy and the aerial photograph together suggest: that a settlement once stood here, changed shape in the record over nearly a century, and then disappeared beneath the soil entirely.