Ringfort (Rath), Pouladown, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Pouladown, Co. Cork

On a west-facing slope in Pouladown, County Cork, there is a circular patch of ground that was once a ringfort but is now, to the untrained eye, almost nothing at all.

What remains is a slight rise, a shallow depression running east to west, and a stony interior that tilts gently downhill. The eastern side is the hardest to read; the bank there has been absorbed into an ordinary field fence running from north-north-west to north-north-east, leaving that arc of the original enclosure functionally invisible unless you know what you are looking for.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed circular settlement typical of early medieval Ireland, usually defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and this one at Pouladown was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a univallate enclosure, meaning it had a single surrounding bank. At that point it was still legible enough to be marked with hachures, the short lines surveyors used to indicate earthworks. Sometime between that survey and the present, the structure was levelled, most likely through agricultural activity. The site measures roughly 36 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, which falls within the typical size range for a rath of this kind, large enough to have sheltered a farmstead and its associated buildings. What the site retains, even in its diminished state, is the quality that presumably made it attractive in the first place: an extensive outlook in all directions from a position that commands the surrounding landscape without dominating it.

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Pete F
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