Ringfort (Rath), Castleshane Demesne, Co. Monaghan

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Castleshane Demesne, Co. Monaghan

On a north-facing slope in County Monaghan, a circular earthwork sits quietly among deciduous trees, its name, Shane's Fort, recorded in gothic lettering on the 1907 Ordnance Survey six-inch map.

That map is the only cartographic source to show it, which gives the site an air of selective survival, known once, noted once, and then left largely to its own company.

A rath is an early medieval ringfort, typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or settlement by a family of some local standing. This example measures roughly 27.6 metres across its interior on the northwest to southeast axis and around 25 metres northeast to southwest, making it a fairly typical size for the type. The enclosing bank and its U-shaped fosse, a flat-bottomed or rounded ditch cut into the slope, are still legible, and traces of an outer bank survive at the north-northwest, running to about 4.3 metres wide. An entrance gap, approximately 2.5 metres across at its base, opens to the northeast, with a causeway crossing the fosse at that point. The fort once sat within the demesne of Castleshane House, which lay around 260 metres to the southwest, but that house no longer exists. The combination of a vanished estate and an earthwork that appears on only a single map edition lends the site an unusual double absence; the great house is gone, and the fort itself was only ever faintly acknowledged.

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