Fort, Killyrean, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Ringforts

Fort, Killyrean, Co. Monaghan

On the 1834 Ordnance Survey six-inch map of County Monaghan, a circular enclosure near Killyrean is marked in gothic lettering as a "fort", the term cartographers of that period used to denote a ringfort, the type of circular earthwork enclosure, typically defined by a bank and ditch, that served as a farmstead or defended homestead throughout early medieval Ireland.

The gothic script was a deliberate signal to readers that something old and of historical note lay there. Today, the field in question shows nothing of the kind. Walk the ground and you will find only pasture.

The site sits towards the top of an east-facing slope on a north-south drumlin ridge, the kind of low elongated hill shaped by glacial activity that defines much of the Monaghan landscape. Roughly two hundred metres to the northwest of Monmurry Lough, a subrectangular lake measuring approximately two hundred and fifty metres north to south and between one hundred and one hundred and forty metres east to west, the position would have offered good sightlines and reasonable drainage, both practical considerations for early settlement. What the map recorded was a circular enclosure about thirty-five metres in external diameter, defined at that point by a field bank. Whether that bank was a degraded remnant of an original earthwork, or simply a field boundary that had been misidentified or long associated with an older feature, cannot now be said with confidence. No archaeological feature survives at ground level.

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