Fort, Scardaun, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Ringforts

Fort, Scardaun, Co. Leitrim

On top of a drumlin in County Leitrim, a grass-covered earthwork sits quietly on its glacially deposited hill, its outline still legible despite centuries of gradual erosion and the encroachment of a farm laneway at its south-eastern edge.

What makes this particular enclosure quietly puzzling is that nobody has yet identified where its original entrance was. Most ringforts and similar enclosures, which were typically farmsteads of the early medieval period enclosed by earthen banks and ditches, preserve at least some trace of a gap or causeway. Here, that detail has been lost.

The enclosure is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 26 metres north to south and 23.5 metres east to west on the interior. It is defined by an earthen bank about three metres wide, which still stands to a height of around 1.5 metres on the exterior, though it has been reduced to a low scarp of 0.6 to 0.8 metres in places. Outside the bank, a fosse, the term for the ditch that typically accompanies such a bank, survives in a distinctive way: a band of rushes about 1.5 metres wide marks where the ditch ran, and to the south-southwest this depression has been enlarged over time into a pond. Field spoil has been added around the perimeter at some point, slightly altering what the original earthwork would have looked like. The drumlin setting itself is significant; drumlins are the smooth, elongated hills left behind by retreating glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, and they were frequently chosen as sites for enclosures across the Irish midlands and north, offering natural elevation and good visibility over surrounding farmland.

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