Fort, Ballymacan, Co. Meath

What was once recorded as a substantial embanked enclosure, roughly 70 metres across, now survives only as fragments absorbed into modern field boundaries, its original form legible more from an old map than from the ground itself.

The enclosure appears on the 1836 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is simply annotated as a "Fort", the catch-all term surveyors of the period applied to ringforts and similar earthworks. A ringfort, to give it its common name, is a roughly circular area enclosed by one or more banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland primarily as a farmstead and livestock enclosure. By the time a field investigator examined the site in 1969, the picture had changed considerably. The external diameter recorded on the Victorian map had reduced to around 50 metres in the surviving evidence, with only a small section of the original bank still identifiable, its base around four metres wide, standing roughly 1.5 metres on the exterior face and less than a metre on the interior. That remnant had been incorporated into a field boundary on the south-east to south side, with an outer drain running alongside it. Elsewhere, only a low scarp in the ground hinted at the rest of the circuit. The site occupies the north-eastern end of a short ridge that forms part of the broader Slieve Breagh upland running roughly east-north-east to west-south-west across this part of Meath, a landscape that contains a significant concentration of early medieval remains. The positioning on elevated ground, modest as the elevation is, would have been typical for a settlement enclosure of this kind, offering a degree of visibility and drainage.