Ringfort (Rath), Leitrim, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Ringforts
In a low-lying field in County Leitrim, partly defined by rock outcrop, there sits a grass-covered circular platform that most people would walk across without a second thought.
It reads, at ground level, as a gentle rise in the earth, roughly twenty metres across and less than a metre high, with only a faint remnant of an earthen bank surviving along its south-south-east edge. It was aerial photography that properly revealed its shape, the kind of bird's-eye clarity that ground-level inspection rarely affords.
The site is classified as a probable rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. A rath usually consisted of a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and an external ditch, known as a fosse, with a single entrance gap. Here, neither the fosse nor any entrance is now visible, which may reflect centuries of agricultural activity gradually smoothing the original earthworks. What remains is the platform itself, measuring approximately twenty metres east to west and nineteen metres north to south, with that slender bank, just three metres wide and barely twenty centimetres high internally, persisting at the southern edge. The dimensions are modest, suggesting a single-household enclosure rather than a site of any particular status, though even small raths could represent the farmsteads of free landholders in the early Irish social order. The rock outcrop that partly defines the setting may have influenced the original choice of location, as builders of these enclosures often worked with the natural contours and features of the land rather than against them.