Cormeen Fort, Cormeen, Co. Meath

Co. Meath |

Ringforts

Cormeen Fort, Cormeen, Co. Meath

On the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the name appears in distinctive gothic lettering, the cartographic convention once used to mark antiquities of note.

That typographic signal is often the first clue that something older than the surrounding farmland is quietly present, and in this case it points to a roughly circular earthwork sitting near the crest of a drumlin ridge in County Meath, its grass-covered interior still legible in the landscape after what may be many centuries.

The site occupies a favourable position towards the spine of a north-west to south-east drumlin, one of those elongated glacial hills shaped like an upturned spoon that pattern much of the Irish midlands and Ulster. The enclosed area measures approximately 42 metres north to south and 39 metres east to west, and it is defined by an earthen bank that varies considerably as it circuits the interior. To the north it retains a base width of around 5.3 metres and modest internal and external heights of roughly a metre. Elsewhere the bank softens into hedgerow or collapses to a mere scarp, a low stepped drop in the ground, suggesting that centuries of agricultural use have eroded and absorbed much of the original construction. A slight external fosse, which is simply a defensive ditch dug around the outside of an enclosure, survives in traces on the south-western to north-western arc, and a narrow berm, a flat shelf of ground separating the scarp from an outer field bank, is still discernible to the south and south-east. No original entrance has been identified, which is not unusual for sites of this kind; the gap that once served as a formal threshold has often been widened, shifted, or simply swallowed by later field boundaries. What remains is a layered palimpsest of an enclosure that has been continuously absorbed into the working landscape around it, its form surviving more by accident than by preservation.

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