Ringfort (Rath), Bellanacargy, Co. Cavan

The dwelling is called Fort House, which suggests whoever built it was under no illusions about what they were doing. The northern and eastern arc of the earthwork has been eaten away by the house and its associated farm buildings, leaving the surviving portion of the bank and fosse to curve away on the undisturbed side like a sentence with its ending cut off.

The site at Bellanacargy is a rath, the most common form of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area ringed by one or more earthen banks and a fosse, which is the accompanying ditch dug to provide the material for the bank itself. Here the internal diameter measures 26.8 metres, making it a reasonably substantial example, and the fosse is described as both wide and deep, suggesting the original construction was considerable. The original entrance is uncertain; it may have faced either north or east-northeast, though the destruction of precisely that portion of the perimeter makes any firm conclusion difficult. Raths like this one were generally farmsteads of the early Christian period, enclosures that protected a family, their livestock, and their grain, and they occur in their thousands across the Irish landscape. What sets this one apart is less its scale than its fate: rather than being levelled for tillage or quietly absorbed into a field boundary, it had a house planted directly into its fabric, and then that house was named after what it had displaced.