Fort, Dundian, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
On the northern tip of a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, a roughly circular patch of grass marks the outline of something much older.
The site is a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead surrounded by an earthen bank that was the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, and what remains at Dundian is a quietly dissolving example of one. The enclosure measures approximately 35 metres across, and while fragments of its original bank survive on the south-eastern to north-western arc, much of the earthwork has long since been absorbed into the surrounding landscape.
The most telling detail about this place may be cartographic. The rath appears on the 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is marked as an embanked enclosure and labelled in gothic lettering as a fort, the convention used at the time to indicate an ancient earthwork of this kind. By the time the site was assessed in more recent decades, the picture had changed considerably. The earthen bank that once defined the enclosure to the south-east, west, and north-west had been incorporated into a field boundary and a road bank, effectively cannibalising the original structure for more practical purposes. Of those two surviving elements, only the road bank now remains intact.