Fort, Derrymacoffin, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Ringforts

Fort, Derrymacoffin, Co. Leitrim

In the townland of Derrymacoffin, a prehistoric or early medieval enclosure sits on a flat-topped rise above the northern shore of St John's Lough, and yet standing on that rise today, you would have no sense that anything was ever there.

The earthwork that cartographers once carefully recorded has effectively vanished from the visible landscape, leaving only the subtly elevated ground itself as any kind of clue.

The 1835 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most methodical surveys of the Irish countryside ever undertaken, marked the site as an oval enclosure measuring roughly fifty metres on its longest axis and twenty metres across, and labelled it simply as a fort. In Irish archaeological usage, a fort of this kind typically refers to a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, defined by one or more earthen banks or stone walls encircling a circular or oval area. This one sat on a rise among rock outcrop and pasture, with the southern shore of the northern part of St John's Lough lying only about thirty metres to its north, a placement that would have offered both a commanding view and ready access to water. The flat-topped rise on which it stands measures approximately thirty metres east to west and fifteen metres north to south, which corresponds closely enough to the enclosure's footprint to suggest that the natural topography and the constructed feature have become, over centuries, almost indistinguishable from each other.

What the Ordnance Survey cartographers could trace in 1835 has since been lost to sight at ground level, though the lough and the rocky pasture remain. The enclosure's oval outline, once legible enough to map with reasonable precision, has been absorbed back into the field.

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