Fort, Currycreaghan, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
There is a monument in the pastureland of Currycreaghan, County Longford, that you could walk across without knowing it was there.
No wall breaks the skyline, no ditch interrupts the ground underfoot, and the original entrance has left no readable trace. The site exists, in a practical sense, more on paper than in the landscape.
The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837 marked this spot as a circular enclosure and labelled it simply "Fort", the word routinely used at the time to indicate a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common throughout early medieval Ireland, typically defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch known as a fosse. When investigators examined the site in 1976, they found a raised circular area roughly twenty-two metres in diameter, edged by a wide, low bank of earth and stone. That bank is all that survives of what was once almost certainly a more defined structure. There was no fosse, and nothing to indicate where people once passed in and out. Whether the ditch was never built, or simply levelled away over the centuries by ploughing and grazing, the record does not say. By the time of the 1976 report, the monument had already sunk below the threshold of visibility at ground level, leaving only the cartographic evidence of the 1837 map and the faint earthwork itself to confirm that something once stood here.
