Ringfort (Rath), Ballymeeny, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballymeeny, Co. Sligo

In a patch of level, wet pasture in Ballymeeny, a low circular mound sits quietly in the landscape, its earthen banks barely clearing the grass.

What makes it interesting is not its height but its layering: this is a rath, a type of ringfort that was once a defended farmstead, likely occupied during the early medieval period, and it preserves an unusual degree of structural complexity in a modest footprint.

The site measures roughly twenty metres across at its raised interior, enclosed by an earthen bank about two and a half metres wide and just forty centimetres high, with a fosse, the broad ditch immediately outside it, running to over three metres in width. Beyond that sits a second, external bank, slightly taller at seventy centimetres. More unusually, an arc of a third bank lies inside the enclosure, concentric with the inner face, separated from it by a narrow flat berm of about one and a quarter metres. This innermost arc curves between the south-east and south-west, and may originally have run further, though dense gorse now colonises a wide band across the southern half of the site and obscures how far it extends. The western and north-eastern sections of the outer enclosure are similarly hidden beneath this overgrowth. No original entrance is any longer legible in the earthworks, and a modern field bank crosses the northern edge, adding another layer of disturbance to what is already a difficult site to read.

The gorse that dominates the interior, spreading in a band roughly fifteen metres wide, is both the site's main obstacle and a kind of accidental guardian. It has kept the land from being ploughed or heavily grazed, which may explain why the concentric inner bank has survived at all.

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Pete F
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