Fort, Mornin, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Ringforts

Fort, Mornin, Co. Longford

On the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map of 1837, a single word appears in a field in Mornin, County Longford: "Fort".

It is a label without a clear object. The earthwork the cartographers were presumably recording is not actually drawn on the map, only named, leaving a toponym floating over a stretch of low-lying, rush-grown land with no obvious structure to justify it.

What survives on the ground today is ambiguous but quietly suggestive. Two curving field boundaries, separated by roughly thirty metres, sweep from north to south and together define a crescent-shaped field approximately sixty metres long and thirty metres wide. The southern edge is closed off by an east-west laneway. This arrangement may preserve the outline of a rath, the type of circular or oval earthen enclosure that served as a farmstead or small defended settlement during the early medieval period in Ireland, typically dating from around the fifth to the twelfth century. The most persuasive evidence sits at the northern end of the field, where the eastern bank, about two metres wide and standing up to 1.6 metres on its outer face, carries a curve that sits at odds with the straight, practical lines of the surrounding field boundaries. The western bank shows a similar kink at its northern end. Both details hint that the field boundaries are not simply agricultural constructions but may have been built onto, or shaped around, the remains of a much older circular enclosure.

The difficulty is that the site refuses to give much away. The crescent-shaped field is largely swallowed by blackthorn scrub and brambles dense enough to prevent any closer inspection of the banks. The poorly drained terrain, typical of the low midland landscape here, adds another layer of difficulty. Whatever the enclosure once was, it has been absorbed so thoroughly into the field system that the word on the 1837 map may now be the clearest evidence that something was ever there at all.

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