Fort, Corrakeeran, Co. Meath

Co. Meath |

Ringforts

Fort, Corrakeeran, Co. Meath

What makes the earthwork at Corrakeeran quietly arresting is not any single feature but the accumulation of them: two concentric banks, a fosse between them, a causewayed entrance, and a total spread of around seventy metres from east to west, all of it sitting on a raised position near the western end of a long ridge.

The interior platform, roughly thirty-eight metres across, is still clearly defined beneath a covering of grass and scrub, and the outer bank rises to nearly two metres on its exterior face in places, giving the whole thing a presence in the landscape that its overgrown condition does little to diminish.

This is a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries and thought to have served as a farmstead, its banks and ditches marking out a defended homestead rather than a military fortification in any modern sense. The fosse, a ditch cut between the two earthen banks, survives with an external depth of between one and one and a half metres, and the causeway that carries the original entrance across it is still traceable at a width of three metres. What gives this particular example additional interest is its setting: another rath lies roughly a hundred and eighty metres to the east along the same ridge, and a possible second rath sits about ninety metres to the west. Corrakeeran therefore sits at the approximate centre of a loose cluster of related enclosures, a pattern that archaeologists recognise across much of the Irish midlands and east, where early farming communities seem to have occupied the same favourable ground in some density.

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