Fort, Mullagh [Mohill By.), Co. Leitrim

A circular enclosure roughly forty metres in diameter was recorded as a named 'Fort' on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1835, and it still showed up, rendered in hachures, on the 1907 edition. Today, farm sheds cover the site, built around 1970, and nothing of the original feature survives at surface level. What makes this quietly unsettling is how completely a place can be erased while its outline persists in the archive.

The structure was almost certainly a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland. Raths, sometimes called ring-forts, were typically earthen banks encircling a farmstead, used for settlement and the enclosure of livestock from perhaps the fifth century through to the early medieval period. Thousands survive across the Irish countryside, though many, like this one in Mullagh in the barony of Mohill, have been lost to agricultural development. The drumlin landscape of south Leitrim is particularly dense with these glacially deposited hills, and their sheltered southern slopes were favoured locations for settlement. This one happened to be in the wrong place when the need for farm buildings arose.