Fort, Drumillard Big, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
In a Monaghan pasture, a hedgerow follows a gentle curve that most people would walk past without a second thought.
That curve, roughly thirty-five metres across, is almost certainly the last surviving trace of a ringfort, a type of circular earthwork enclosure used across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically as a farmstead or defended homestead. The earthen bank that once defined it has not disappeared so much as been absorbed, folded quietly into a field boundary that now does the practical work of separating one piece of grazing land from another.
The site sits at the north-western end of a drumlin ridge running north-west to south-east, drumlins being the low, smoothed hills left behind by glacial action and characteristic of counties like Monaghan. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch mapping in 1834, the enclosure was still legible enough as a distinct feature to be marked and labelled in the gothic lettering the surveyors reserved for antiquities, recorded simply as a fort. By the time the revised edition appeared in 1907, that clarity had already begun to dissolve; the cartographers could only indicate a curve in a field bank. Today, nothing is visible at ground level, and the archaeology survives, if it survives at all, as buried earthwork beneath the pasture and within the body of the hedge itself.