Ringfort (Rath), Colgagh, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
A low circular bank sitting in quiet pasture north of Colgagh Lough in County Sligo might not stop a casual walker in their tracks, yet this ringfort carries a small structural curiosity worth noting.
Its interior rises roughly two metres above the surrounding ground, not because of any great engineering effort but because the builders chose to work with a natural hillock that was already there, letting the land do some of the work. That kind of opportunism was common in early medieval Ireland, when a rath, an earthen ringfort enclosed by a bank and ditch, was typically the defended farmstead of a single family or small community, and any existing elevation was worth incorporating.
The fort itself is circular, with a diameter of around 28 metres, enclosed by a broad bank of earth and stone nearly 7.6 metres wide, though it rises only modestly above the interior surface. Unusually, no fosse, the encircling ditch that normally accompanies such a bank, is visible at ground level, which either reflects the original design or the effects of centuries of agricultural activity. At the southern side, a gap of just over two metres in the bank, accompanied by a ramp sloping outward, preserves what appears to be the original entrance. A later drystone field wall, running roughly north-northeast to east-southeast, has been laid directly on top of the bank along part of its circuit, a reminder of how these ancient boundaries were quietly absorbed into the working landscape of subsequent generations. Sitting 120 metres to the southwest is a cashel, a similar enclosure but built primarily of stone rather than earth, making this a corner of the Sligo countryside with a notable concentration of early settlement evidence in a compact area.