Ringfort (Rath), Cornamunady, Co. Monaghan

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cornamunady, Co. Monaghan

In Cornamunady, on top of a drumlin, a ringfort once stood, and that is more or less all that can be said with confidence.

A drumlin is one of those smooth, whale-backed hills left behind by retreating glaciers, and the elevated position would have been typical for a rath, the Irish term for a circular earthwork enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. What makes this particular example unusual is not what survives, but what does not: there is no visible trace of the site on the ground, and its exact location has never been pinned down.

The sole evidence for the enclosure's existence is a single cartographic source, McCrea's map of County Monaghan, produced in 1793. No other historical map appears to record it, and nothing in the landscape has been identified as a physical remnant. It is, in effect, a place known only through one eighteenth-century mapmaker's decision to mark something at a spot that can no longer be found with any certainty. Whether McCrea observed the earthwork himself or was recording local knowledge is not clear, but his map remains the only thread connecting this ringfort to the documented record.

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Pete F
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