Ringfort (Rath), Farrancotter, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Farrancotter, Co. Cork

Beneath a pasture in Farrancotter, north Cork, there is a ringfort that has effectively ceased to exist above ground.

A rath, as this type of earthwork enclosure is known in Irish, was typically formed by one or more circular banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of habitation. This one has been levelled entirely, leaving no visible surface trace for anyone walking the field today.

What makes it particularly interesting is what the old maps reveal. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 recorded it as a hachured circular enclosure of roughly 40 metres in diameter, the hachuring indicating an earthen bank rising from the surrounding ground. By the time the 1937 revision of the same map series was produced, the feature had shrunk in the record to a broken-line circle of only around 30 metres across, and its position had shifted by somewhere between 10 and 20 metres to the south-west relative to where it had previously been plotted. Whether that discrepancy reflects genuine cartographic error, a resurvey, or some change to the physical remains between those two dates is now difficult to say. What is clear is that at some point after 1937, whatever earthwork survived was removed altogether, most likely through agricultural improvement of the kind that erased thousands of similar sites across Ireland during the twentieth century.

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Pete F
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