Ringfort (Rath), Pluckanes, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Pluckanes, Co. Cork

A ringfort that no longer exists above ground is, in one sense, easy to overlook.

At Pluckanes in mid Cork, on a south-facing slope of pasture, there is nothing left to see. No earthen bank survives, no ditch, no trace of whatever enclosure once occupied this spot. The land has been levelled, and the site persists now only on paper.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically circular enclosures defined by earthen banks and ditches, used as farmsteads and defended homesteads across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards. The one at Pluckanes was recorded on the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps of 1842, 1904, and 1937 as a hachured circular enclosure, meaning cartographers marked it with the short radiating lines used to indicate raised ground or earthworks. Its diameter was approximately 33 metres. That it appeared consistently across nearly a century of mapping suggests it was still a legible feature of the landscape well into the twentieth century, even if no longer intact. At some point between the last of those surveys and the present, it was removed entirely, most likely through agricultural improvement of the kind that eliminated thousands of such monuments across Ireland during the latter half of the twentieth century.

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