Fort, Cloghan, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
On the south-eastern end of a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, a circular earthwork sits quietly in a field, its original entrance long since lost among later gaps cut through the bank.
The site is a rath, an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically constructed between roughly 500 and 1000 AD as a raised circular platform surrounded by a bank and ditch. This particular example measures around thirty-two metres across at its widest, the grass-covered interior sitting noticeably lower on the inside than the outer face of the bank, which still rises to about 1.8 metres externally at its north-east arc. There is no surviving fosse, the defensive ditch that would normally accompany such a bank, and a field boundary has been built hard against the outer scarp at some point, blurring the original profile further.
What gives the site an added layer of quiet interest is a depression running from the centre southward, branching off with a short spur to the west. The feature is roughly eleven and a half metres long and drops to a maximum depth of around 1.35 metres. It may be a destroyed souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage often associated with raths and used for storage or refuge. The qualification matters, though: there is no visible stonework remaining, so whatever the original purpose of the cut, its evidence has not survived in any identifiable form. The rath appears on McCrea's map of County Monaghan from 1793, as well as on the Ordnance Survey six-inch editions of 1834 and 1907, suggesting it was a recognisable feature in the landscape across several centuries of cartographic record.