Ringfort (Rath), Cloghboola More, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cloghboola More, Co. Cork

Two ringforts sitting fifty metres apart in the same field system is unusual enough to give you pause.

At Cloghboola More, on an east-facing slope in County Cork, a pair of these early medieval enclosures occupy adjoining fields, close enough that their relationship feels deliberate rather than coincidental. One of the two has been largely levelled, reduced by farming activity over many decades, yet it has not entirely disappeared. A slightly raised circular area, roughly thirty metres across, still marks the ground to the south of the surviving arc, a faint but legible trace of what was once a complete enclosure.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically the enclosed homesteads of farming families during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, with a bank and sometimes a ditch forming a defensive or status boundary around a dwelling. The surviving portion at Cloghboola More runs as an arc from the north-west to the north-east, formed by an earthen bank with a stone-facing, and has been absorbed into the existing field fence system over time. A substantial stone slab, four and a half metres long, has been thrown up against the inner face of the bank to the north, suggesting the kind of incidental disturbance that accumulates across generations of agricultural use. The site appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842, 1904, and 1935, each time as a hachured circular enclosure of around thirty-five metres in diameter, confirming that the levelling happened after the earliest of those surveys. There is also a possible souterrain in the interior, a souterrain being an underground stone-lined passage associated with ringforts and thought to have served for storage or refuge. Writing in 1937, a researcher named Broker described both this fort and its neighbour fifty metres to the east as being of average size, each with a double fence, suggesting the enclosing banks were originally more substantial than what survives today.

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