Fort, Cloghan, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
On a north-west-facing slope in County Monaghan, an oval patch of grass and scrub holds the remains of a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland.
What makes this particular example quietly interesting is the way later agricultural life has grown around and into it: field banks have been built directly against the old earthen enclosure, and a gap that was almost certainly the original entrance, roughly two metres wide on the east-south-east side, is now blocked by one of those same banks. The rath has essentially been absorbed into the working landscape, its boundaries pressed into service as convenient edges for fields.
The enclosure measures roughly 34 metres on its north-north-west to south-south-east axis and 24 metres across, sitting on a small ridge that runs in the same direction. The earthen bank that defines it survives unevenly: on the south-west it still stands about 2.3 metres above the surrounding ground on its outer face, while the south-east stretch is considerably reduced, rising less than a metre externally. Elsewhere the bank has been worn down to little more than a scarp, a low cut edge in the ground. There is no visible fosse, the external ditch that often accompanies this kind of monument, which may mean it was never dug here or has simply silted and levelled over time. The site appears on McCrea's Map of the County of Monaghan, published in 1793, and on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1834 and 1907, meaning it was a recognisable feature of the landscape for at least two centuries of recorded cartography before modern archaeological description caught up with it.