Ringfort (Rath), Brockagh, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Brockagh, Co. Sligo

In the gently rolling pastureland of Brockagh in County Sligo, a low circular rise in a field marks the outline of an early medieval homestead that has been quietly dissolving back into the landscape for over a thousand years.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads, home to a single family and their livestock, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The earthen bank that once defined the boundary of this one remains only partially intact, and what survives tells a story of gradual absorption into the working farmland around it.

The site takes the form of a circular raised area approximately eighteen metres in diameter. Where it survives, the bank of earth and stone measures about 3.35 metres wide and stands just 0.4 metres above the interior level. Beyond it lies an external fosse, a shallow encircling ditch, running to nearly 6.8 metres wide but only 0.3 metres deep, the material from which would originally have been used to build up the bank. Between the south-west and east sections, however, the bank has disappeared entirely. In its place, a scarp, a short but distinct drop in the ground surface, marks the outer edge, standing about 0.7 metres high externally. Along the south-east to south-west arc, the remains of the bank have been absorbed into a field boundary, so that what was once a domestic enclosure has become, in part, an agricultural boundary line. The original entrance has not survived in any recognisable form.

The monument is set on a broad rise in otherwise undulating ground, a positioning typical of ringforts, whose builders generally favoured slightly elevated spots that offered modest drainage and visibility. The field boundary that now follows the line of the old bank is a useful detail for anyone trying to trace the outline on the ground, though the shallow dimensions of what remains mean the site reads more clearly from an oblique angle than head-on.

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