Ringfort (Rath), Derryleagh, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Derryleagh, Co. Cork

The Irish name for this oval earthwork in Derryleagh is Lios Na gColl, the Fort of the Hazels, and it carries that name across several centuries of local memory even as the physical structure has slowly been picked apart.

A lios, or rath, is a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries, defined by one or more earthen banks and a surrounding ditch known as a fosse. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is what has happened to it in the intervening years, and what can still be read in the ground.

The enclosure sits on a south-facing slope in pasture, an oval platform measuring roughly forty metres north to south and thirty-five metres east to west. The earthen bank that once ringed it still reaches about one and a half metres on the interior side, with the inner face sloping gently inward to give the whole interior a shallow, saucer-shaped profile. An entrance gap, four metres wide, opens to the south-east. The external fosse, the defensive ditch dug outside the bank, survives best along the south-south-west to north-north-east arc, where it remains overgrown and reasonably intact; elsewhere it has been quarried away, particularly to the north-east. When Bowman recorded the site in 1934, citing E. Guerin, it was described as a double-ramparted fort, with roughly a third of the outer rampart still standing at that point. That outer ring has since been further reduced, but its former presence confirms the site once carried more elaborate defences than a single bank alone. Inside the enclosure, a slight linear depression runs on a north-west to south-east axis, and a separate depression surrounded by spoil heaps sits near the south-south-west bank, suggesting disturbance or informal digging at some stage. A field boundary runs along the southern and northern edges of the enclosure, the kind of agricultural pragmatism that has shaped, and eroded, countless such monuments across Ireland.

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