Fort, Fennor, Co. Meath
Co. Meath |
Ringforts
The most telling detail about this earthwork near Fennor is that by 1969, barely a fragment of it remained above ground.
A circular embanked enclosure, roughly thirty to thirty-five metres in external diameter, once sat on a gentle rise in the rolling County Meath countryside. Today, later field boundaries have cut across it at two different angles, leaving almost nothing legible in the landscape.
The sole cartographic record of the enclosure as a coherent monument appears on the 1836 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is marked in the distinctive gothic lettering that the OS convention of the time reserved for antiquities, labelled simply as a "Fort". Enclosures of this type, low circular earthen banks enclosing a roughly domestic-scale interior, are generally understood as ringforts, the most common surviving field monument in Ireland and typically associated with early medieval farmsteads. Whether this particular example was ever excavated, or what it contained, is not recorded. By the time anyone looked closely at it in the modern archaeological sense, a field bank running northwest to southeast had already clipped the southwest of the enclosure, and a second bank cutting northeast to southwest had done the same at the south. The monument was effectively dismembered by the ordinary business of agricultural land division, the original earthwork surviving only as a small residual bank noted in the mid-twentieth century.
