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Fairy fort / earthen ringfort in Lisnaboy Lower

Fairy fort / earthen ringfort

What is recorded here

Fairy forts are not fairy forts. They are human ringforts, misnamed because people stopped remembering the humans who built them. Lisnaboy Lower still holds a circular shadow in pasture, twenty-one metres across, its rampart reduced to a low ridge and its ditch filled with soil and forgetting. Bowman measured six to ten feet of wall remaining in 1934; a third of the circuit had already vanished. The fairies did not build it. People did, lived there, left it, and let the story replace the history.
In pasture, on S-facing slope. Circular area ( diam. c. 21m) defined by low rise (H 0.14m) SSW->NW and by slight scarp NE->SE. Recorded by Bowman (1934, 263) as single-ramparted fort on M. Kearn's land with 'about one-third of circuit...levelled' and 'remainder from 6 to 10 ft. high'; fosse infilled. 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

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What survives
Recorded monument

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