Ringfort (Rath), Corbally, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
Someone, at some point in the early medieval period, chose a steep north-north-easterly slope above the Owenacurra river and decided it was worth the considerable effort of building a home there.
The result is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a circular earthwork enclosure typically used as a farmstead between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is the engineering compromise its builders had to make: rather than level the ground, they raised the interior fill on the downhill side to a height of up to two metres, effectively creating a platform that partially, though not entirely, compensates for the gradient. The floor still slopes. Whoever lived inside would have known it.
The enclosure is roughly circular, measuring forty metres north to south and forty-one metres east to west, and is defined by a dumped stone bank reaching about a metre in height along the western and southern arc. Along the eastern and south-eastern edge the bank has been absorbed into a field fence, a common fate for prehistoric and early medieval earthworks in agricultural landscapes, where later farmers found ready-made boundary material and simply incorporated it. A gap on the north-north-east side likely served as the original entrance, orientated towards the river below. Inside the bank to the north there are faint traces of a raised area, possibly the remains of a structure or a secondary enclosure, though the slope makes the interior difficult to read clearly. The site sits at the south-east corner of a pasture field, looking out over the Owenacurra.