Fort, Mullynahinch, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

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Fort, Mullynahinch, Co. Monaghan

On the 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a small circular enclosure on a gentle ridge in Mullynahinch is marked in gothic lettering as a 'fort', the conventional shorthand used by early mapmakers for the ringforts that dot the Irish countryside.

Ringforts, which are enclosed circular areas defined by earthen banks or ditches, were typically built during the early medieval period as farmsteads or places of refuge, and thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one, however, has not fared especially well.

When surveyors visited the site in 1983, they found a slightly dished, grass-covered area measuring 16.3 metres across, with a few tree-stumps remaining on the perimeter where the 1834 map had shown a ring of trees. The defining earthen bank, at just ten centimetres in height, was barely perceptible at that point. By 1995, the situation had worsened considerably; the area was being ploughed, a fate that has claimed a significant number of Ireland's smaller and less prominent earthworks over the course of the twentieth century. What the 1834 mapmakers carefully noted in gothic script had, within a century and a half, been reduced to almost nothing.

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