Fort, Reduff, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
At Reduff in County Monaghan, an ancient earthwork sits astride a drumlin in a way that is quietly difficult to make sense of.
The drumlin, one of the glacier-deposited oval ridges that define so much of the Monaghan landscape, does not simply sit beneath the fort; it actually rises up through the interior of the monument like a spine, so that the ground inside the enclosure is itself uneven and ridged. It is an unusual relationship between landform and human construction, and one that gives the site a slightly ambiguous character.
The enclosure is subcircular in shape, measuring roughly 39 metres on its longer north-west to south-east axis and 33 metres across. It is defined by an earthen bank, about ten metres wide at its base, which survives to an internal height of around 1.8 metres on the south-east and south sides. On the north-west, where the ground drops away steeply by over four metres, the bank gives way to a natural or reinforced scarp. There is no visible fosse, the term for the external ditch that typically accompanies earthen enclosures of this type, though a narrow flat berm of about 2.4 metres separates the bank from a field wall on the south-east side. No original entrance has been identified, which leaves open the question of how and where people moved in and out. Whether this is a ringfort of early medieval date or something earlier is not recorded, and the scrub and grass cover that now clothes the site obscures whatever surface detail might otherwise help to answer that.