Ringfort (Rath), Moneen, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Moneen, Co. Cork

In a pasture on an east-facing slope in north Cork, a low circular earthwork sits quietly in working farmland, easy to miss if you did not know what you were looking for.

What makes this particular field quietly remarkable is not the ringfort on its own, but the fact that roughly sixty metres to its south sits an unclassified megalithic tomb, the two monuments sharing the same ground across a span of time that stretches from the Neolithic or Bronze Age into the early medieval period.

The ringfort itself, sometimes called a rath, is a type of enclosed farmstead that was in widespread use across Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive in various states, from imposing earthworks to barely-there smears in the soil. This example is modest: a roughly circular area measuring about twenty-four metres north to south, enclosed by the low remains of an earthen bank. The internal face of that bank rises to around sixty centimetres, the external face to about fifty, meaning this was never a formidable defensive structure so much as a defined boundary for a homestead and its immediate activity. There are possible traces of an external fosse, essentially a ditch, to the west, and the interior of the enclosure slopes downward towards the east. The megalithic tomb nearby, catalogued but as yet unclassified in terms of its specific type, predates the ringfort by potentially several thousand years, and the proximity of the two suggests this slope had some persistent draw for the people who farmed or gathered here across very different eras.

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Pete F
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