Fort, Blackraw, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
On the south-eastern slope of a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, a quietly purposeful earthwork sits overlooking what was once two separate lakes, Blackraw and Greagh Loughs, now merged into a single body of water some 200 metres to the south.
The fort is not dramatic from a distance, being largely grass-covered and worn down by centuries of agricultural activity, but its underlying geometry is surprisingly intact. Two concentric earthen banks, separated by a fosse, a wide ditch dug to increase the defensive drop between inner and outer works, enclose a subcircular area roughly 36 metres east to west and 32 metres north to south. The outer bank has been absorbed into a field boundary for much of its circuit, partly replaced by a stone wall, and field banks have been built along its top in places, which is how many of these earthworks survive at all: folded into the working landscape rather than preserved apart from it.
The entrance is at the north-north-east, where causeways cross both banks and the fosse between them, the inner causeway nearly four metres wide at its base and the outer slightly wider still. This deliberate, funnelled approach is characteristic of the ringfort tradition in Ireland, earthwork enclosures that served as defended farmsteads from roughly the Early Medieval period onwards, though individual examples are often difficult to date without excavation. Two features inside the enclosure are harder to explain. A long, narrow depression running from the centre towards the north-north-west bank may be a collapsed souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage sometimes used for storage or refuge, though no stonework is visible at the surface. There is also a circular hollow, about six metres across and forty centimetres deep, sitting inside the bank at the southern side. Whether these anomalies represent domestic structures, later disturbance, or something older is not known. The drumlin setting, with its view across the combined lake below, suggests the site was chosen as much for what it could see as for what it could defend.