What is recorded here

Fairy forts are not fairy forts at all. They are ordinary ringforts, built by people, remembered sideways. Ballynamona is one of them: a shallow circle in farmland, its bank broken open and spilled into the ditch beside it. What looks like mystery is only time, doing what time does.

In tillage. Depicted as hachured circular enclosure on 1842 OS 6-inch map; as hachured circular raised area (diam. c. 28m) on 1906 and 1934 OS 6-inch maps, with narrow pond skirting site WSW->NE. Circular slightly raised area (34m E-W) surrounded by flooded area W->E which corresponds to fosse. According to local information, bank which once enclosed site was levelled off into fosse. Ringfort (CO027-010---) lies c. 120m to W and circular enclosure (CO 027-163---) c. 50m to NE. The above description is derived from the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Cork. Volume 4: North Cork' (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2000). In certain instances the entries have been revised and updated in the light of recent research. Date of upload/revision: 14 January 2009

A fairy fort or earthen ringfort in Ballynamona, likely dating to the early medieval period, is represented on 19th- and early 20th-century Ordnance Survey maps as a circular, slightly raised enclosure with a narrow pond to the WSW. Local tradition associates such sites with fairy activity, and they were often avoided due to beliefs in their supernatural inhabitants.

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