Fort, Corramartin, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Ringforts
On the upper slope of a drumlin ridge in County Leitrim, a roughly circular enclosure sits quietly beneath a covering of grass and encroaching vegetation, its original purpose and date unrecorded.
Nobody knows where its entrance once was. That small absence, the missing threshold, gives the place an oddly sealed quality, as though whatever happened inside was never meant to be approached from any particular direction.
The enclosure measures roughly 24.5 metres north to south and 23 metres east to west across the interior, defined by a low bank of earth and stone that is now heavily overgrown. A fosse, which is a defensive ditch, runs around the outside of the bank, though both features have been reduced over time to modest dimensions. A field bank with its own internal ditch cuts across part of the perimeter on the south-western to north-western side, suggesting that later agricultural use has overlapped with the older structure in ways that are now difficult to unpick. The site sits on a north-east to south-west drumlin ridge, the kind of elongated glacial hill that gives this part of Leitrim its corrugated, rolling character, and the west-facing slope on which it stands would once have offered a wide outlook over lower ground. Enclosures of this broadly ringfort type, built from earth and stone rather than the more familiar raised earthen raths found elsewhere in Ireland, are scattered across the Irish landscape and were generally associated with early medieval settlement and farming, though individual sites vary considerably in age and function.