Ringfort (Rath), Coornahahilly, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Coornahahilly, Co. Cork

What you find in a field at Coornahahilly in mid Cork is a circle of earth that has been holding its shape for over a thousand years, its bank still rising more than a metre above the surrounding pasture.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, a form of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Hundreds survive across the Irish countryside, many reduced to faint cropmarks or ploughed-out shadows, which makes the relative preservation here quietly notable.

The fort is roughly circular, measuring 32 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west, a size typical of a single-family enclosure. The earthen bank survives on the north-western to southern arc, standing at about 1.15 metres high. Elsewhere the boundary takes the form of a scarp, a steep face cut into the slope rather than a built-up bank, and this scarp has been reinforced with large stone slabs and some additional stone facing, a detail that lends the structure a slightly more substantial character than a purely earthen equivalent. There are two breaks in the perimeter, one to the south-south-west, about five metres wide and likely the original entrance, and a second to the north-north-west. The interior is not flat. The northern half slopes gently down towards the south-west, following the natural hillside, while the southern half has been raised or levelled to counteract that slope, a small but deliberate piece of engineering that would have made the enclosed space more usable for whoever lived and worked within it. The fort sits on a south-west-facing slope, in what is now pasture land, the kind of quietly unremarkable agricultural setting in which early medieval people chose, with some regularity, to build their homes.

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