Fort, Fihoragh, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
On the highest point of a drumlin ridge in County Longford, there is a fort that can no longer be seen.
Not hidden by vegetation or obscured by later building, but genuinely gone from the surface of the land, leaving nothing for the eye to catch. It survives now only as a shape in the earth, legible to those who know precisely where and how to look.
The site appeared on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1837, marked as a circular enclosure and labelled simply "Fort", the standard shorthand for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically defined by a circular earthen bank and an outer ditch. By 1976, when the site was examined and recorded, the structure had been levelled. Even so, surveyors were still able to trace the ghost of its original form: a bank roughly four metres wide, an external fosse, also around four metres across, which had been filled in, and an enclosed interior measuring approximately 29.5 metres in diameter. The position on the drumlin crest is consistent with how such enclosures were sited, chosen for visibility and drainage rather than defence in any strictly military sense.
Today nothing is visible at ground level. The fort at Fihoragh exists, in a practical sense, only on the 1837 map and in the measurements taken nearly fifty years ago.