Ringfort (Rath), Kiltycooly, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kiltycooly, Co. Sligo

In a field of gently rolling pasture in Kiltycooly, County Sligo, a faint circular swelling in the ground is all that announces the presence of an early medieval settlement site.

A rath, as this type of ringfort is more precisely called, was once the enclosed farmstead of an Irish family of some local standing, its earthen bank defining a boundary between domestic space and the wider world. Here, that boundary has survived, though only just.

The site takes the form of a slightly raised circular area roughly twenty metres across, ringed by a broad bank of earth and stone. That bank is nearly five metres wide, yet rises only about thirty centimetres above the interior ground level, which gives some measure of how thoroughly time and agricultural use have compressed it. The fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanies such banks and provided the material from which they were originally thrown up, has disappeared entirely at ground level. Along the north-west to north-east arc, even the bank itself has been removed, leaving only a gentle scarp, a low step in the ground, to indicate where it once stood. Whatever entrance originally allowed people, animals, and carts to pass through the enclosure has also been lost, leaving the circuit unreadable as a functioning space.

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Pete F
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