Fort, Drummanreagh, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
On the highest point of a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, a partial ring of earthwork survives where a much larger enclosure once stood complete.
The drumlin, a smooth elongated hill shaped by glacial deposition, gave whoever built this circular embanked fort a commanding position over the surrounding landscape, and that elevated placement is still the first thing a visitor notices. What they see today, however, is considerably less than what once existed.
When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1834, the site appeared as a full circular embanked enclosure, labelled in the gothic lettering the surveyors typically reserved for antiquities. A field bank already bisected it at that point, running northwest to southeast, and another approached the perimeter from the southwest, suggesting that agricultural reorganisation was well under way even then. By 1907, the portion of the enclosure lying to the northeast of that dividing bank had been removed entirely, and the western and northern arc of the perimeter had been reshaped into a straight field boundary, losing its original curvature in the process. What remains is a section of the defining earthen bank on the southeastern and southern side, measuring four metres in width, rising roughly 0.8 metres on the interior and 1.8 metres on the exterior face. Alongside it, part of the outer fosse, the surrounding ditch that would originally have reinforced the enclosure's boundary, is still discernible, around 3.6 metres wide at the top, narrowing to one metre at the base, and surviving to a depth of about 0.3 metres. Such enclosures are commonly referred to in Ireland as raths or ring-forts, the remains of enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites dating broadly to the early medieval period, though many were in use across a wider span of centuries. The Drummanreagh example is a quiet case study in how thoroughly these earthworks could be absorbed into the working field system of the nineteenth century, leaving only a fragment to mark where the whole once stood.