Ringfort (Rath), Bunnafedia, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Bunnafedia, Co. Sligo

What makes this ringfort at Bunnafedia quietly compelling is that it rises more than three metres out of flat, low-lying pasture, a mound conspicuous enough to suggest it was always meant to be seen.

A rath, as this class of monument is generally known, is a roughly circular enclosure built in early medieval Ireland, most commonly as a farmstead for a family of some local standing. They are common across the Irish countryside, but this one is more substantial than most, and its layered engineering is still legible in the ground.

The circular platform on top of the mound measures approximately 34 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south, and is enclosed by a bank of earth and stone roughly six metres wide, with traces of stone kerbing along its inner face. At the base of the mound runs a wide fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, around five metres across, with its own outer bank rising between one and one-and-a-quarter metres. That outer bank has, over time, been absorbed into the modern field boundary along its southern and western arc, which is how many such monuments are quietly altered without any single dramatic intervention. The original entrance survives on the eastern side, where two stone-lined breaks in the bank, each slightly different in width, are joined by a causeway crossing the fosse. Just inside the entrance, a slightly sunken rectangular area roughly nine metres by eight and a half metres is outlined on two sides by deliberate settings of small stones, though only the trace of its north-western side now remains. What this internal feature was used for, whether a structure, a yard, or something else, is not recorded, but its careful stonework suggests it was purposeful rather than incidental.

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