Ringfort (Rath), Ballinlig, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballinlig, Co. Sligo

On the coastal pastureland of Ballinlig in County Sligo, a raised oval platform sits atop a steep-sided mound nearly two and a half metres high, its dimensions suggesting something more carefully engineered than the average field boundary.

This is a rath, a type of ringfort that served as an enclosed farmstead during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands were built across Ireland, but each one is slightly different, and this one rewards a closer look.

The platform measures roughly 37 metres from north-north-west to south-south-east and 29 metres across its shorter axis, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone around seven and a half metres wide. Around the southern and western base of the mound runs a fosse, essentially a defensive ditch, about three metres across, backed by its own outer bank. What makes the construction particularly legible is the survival of several original features: traces of a stone kerb along the inner face of the bank at the south-east, boulders revetted along the upper edge of the bank in the same quadrant, and a deliberate break in the inner bank at the south-south-east, just under one and a half metres wide, with a ramp that almost certainly marks where people and livestock originally passed in and out. That entrance ramp is a small but telling detail, a practical solution to the height of the mound that has outlasted the people who used it by well over a thousand years.

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Pete F
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