Ringfort (Rath), Billis, Co. Cavan
Co. Cavan |
Ringforts
A low circular platform rises almost imperceptibly from the fields near Billis in County Cavan, its outline just legible enough to suggest a life lived inside it, long ago.
This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead used throughout early medieval Ireland, typically between the sixth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them survive across the country in various states of preservation, but this one has been quietly losing the argument with the landscape for some time.
The site consists of a raised circular area roughly 38.5 metres in internal diameter, enclosed by a slight earthen bank and what remains of a fosse, a shallow surrounding ditch, here measuring about 2.3 metres in width. Neither feature is especially pronounced, and whatever original entrance once broke the circuit of the bank can no longer be identified. A more recent intervention has compounded the difficulty: a modern field bank and trench cuts across the interior in a roughly north-northeast to south-southeast direction, dividing the enclosed space into two unequal sections. The smaller of those portions, to the east-northeast, has been partially ploughed out, removing whatever surface traces once survived there. The cumulative effect is a site where the original form has to be inferred rather than read directly from the ground.