Ringfort (Rath), Rathdaggan, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rathdaggan, Co. Cork

Along a north-south ridge in north Cork, looped on three sides by the River Funshion, a circular earthwork sits in pasture that has been quietly undoing it for decades.

What remains is a bivallate ringfort, meaning one enclosed by two concentric banks rather than the single bank more commonly associated with these early medieval farmstead enclosures. The interior measures roughly thirty metres across, and the space between the two banks, the fosse, survives most clearly to the south, where the banks are spaced far enough apart that the channel between them reads less as a ditch and more as a narrow path, heavily overgrown and pressed in on both sides.

The site has taken damage from two directions. Quarrying from the north-north-east has eaten into the northern side of the enclosure, removing the inner bank and the intervening fosse across the arc between west and north-north-east, and breaking the outer bank in corresponding places. The inner bank, where it does survive from the north-east around to the west, stands only about twenty centimetres above the interior ground level, though it rises to around one and a half metres when measured from the outside down to the base of the fosse. The outer bank, more intact along the southern arc, reaches about one point two metres on its exterior face. Then there is the more deliberate intervention: local information holds that the site was levelled around 1989, which accounts for the flat, undifferentiated interior that offers no surface indication of whatever structures or features may once have occupied it. Ringforts of this kind were typically the enclosed farmsteads of Early Christian Ireland, in use roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and a bivallate example would generally have belonged to a household of some standing, the double bank suggesting additional effort and perhaps additional status.

The fort occupies a genuinely considered position, sitting at the top of a ridge with the river curving protectively around it to the west, north, and north-east. The combination of earthwork and natural water boundary would have made the enclosure considerably more defensible, or at least more visibly authoritative, in its original form. What the quarrying and the levelling have left behind is a partial outline, more legible from the southern section than anywhere else, where the surviving fosse still traces the geometry of something that was once very deliberately placed on this particular bend of the Funshion.

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