Ringfort (Rath), Cúil An Bhuacaigh, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cúil An Bhuacaigh, Co. Cork

A thousand-year-old enclosure being bisected by a farm lane and converted into a kitchen garden is not exactly the fate most people imagine for an early medieval settlement site, yet that is precisely what happened at this rath in Cúil An Bhuacaigh.

A rath is a ringfort, the circular earthen enclosure that served as a farmstead and homestead for a single family or small community during the early medieval period in Ireland, and thousands of them survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This particular example, roughly thirty metres in diameter, has fared rather worse than many.

The enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, marked with hachuring that indicated a clearly defined circular earthwork on a south-facing slope just to the south of a farmyard. At some point after that survey was made, the enclosing bank, which would originally have been a raised earthen rampart, was levelled entirely and replaced with a stone fence following the same circular line. A north-to-south lane was then cut straight through the interior, dividing the space in two, and the ground within was turned over for use as a garden. One curious survival sits on the fence to the south-west: a perforated stone measuring roughly sixty centimetres by forty, its original function unrecorded. Perforated stones appear in various agricultural and domestic contexts across Ireland, sometimes as gate pivots or tethering stones, though what purpose this one served here is not stated.

The outline of the original enclosure is still legible in the stone fence that replaced the bank, so the circular footprint of the rath has not been entirely erased, even if the earthwork itself is long gone.

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