Fort, Ballymore, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
On a south-west-facing slope in County Longford, a large raised platform sits quietly on a shelf of level ground, its edges still clearly defined despite centuries of weathering and agricultural activity.
What makes the site worth pausing over is its sheer scale and the deliberate engineering it represents. The enclosed area measures roughly 75 metres from east-north-east to west-south-west and around 60 metres in the perpendicular direction, making it a substantial presence in the landscape even if it no longer announces itself dramatically.
The enclosure is formed by a combination of earthen and stone bank along its northern arc, running from north-west through north to south-east, with the bank measuring between 5.3 and 5.7 metres wide and standing anywhere from 0.45 to 1.5 metres high. Along the remaining circuit, the boundary takes the form of a scarp, essentially a cut or drop in the ground surface, rising between 1.4 and 2.15 metres. A fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, runs along the east-north-east side, about 6 metres wide and a metre deep, while along the western side its course is marked by a berm, a flat strip of ground between the ditch and the bank proper. A survey carried out in 1988 noted a low outer bank to the south, but that feature has since disappeared entirely from the ground surface. No original entrance survives in any recognisable form, which is itself a quietly telling detail: the way in and out of this place has been lost, leaving the interior accessible now only by reading the contours of the earthworks themselves.