Ringfort (Rath), Imogane, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Imogane, Co. Cork

What looks at first glance like a gentle undulation in a Cork pasture turns out, on closer inspection, to be the eroded outline of a structure that has sat in this landscape for well over a thousand years.

The ringfort at Imogane occupies a south-facing slope, its circular form still just legible as a low earthen rise enclosing an interior roughly forty-one metres across. Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the typical farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, built to define a family's living space and provide a degree of protection for people and livestock. This one has survived, but only barely.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1937, where it appeared as a hachured circular raised area with a diameter of around thirty-five metres. More precise measurements taken subsequently put the enclosure at 41.6 metres north to south and 40.6 metres east to west. The enclosing bank reaches a maximum height of only half a metre, and the external fosse, a shallow defensive ditch running from the north-west around to the north, drops to no more than 0.9 metres at its deepest. On the western and northern sides, the inner bank has been reduced to little more than a slope falling gently toward the interior. An aerial photograph captured what ground-level inspection makes difficult to see clearly: a cropmark tracing both the bank and the fosse, and suggesting a possible entrance on the north-eastern side. Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried or low-relief earthworks affect the growth of vegetation above them, making the underlying archaeology visible from altitude even when it has almost vanished at ground level.

The site sits in open pasture, and the south-facing slope that once made it an attractive location for an early medieval farmstead still gives the ground a particular quality of light on clear days. The bank is so low now that a visitor walking across it might not register it as anything deliberate, which is part of what makes the aerial photograph so useful; it restores a legibility that centuries of agriculture have otherwise worn away.

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