Fort, Kilnaclay, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Ringforts

Fort, Kilnaclay, Co. Monaghan

On the eastern summit of a ridge in Kilnaclay, County Monaghan, a raised grass-covered platform sits quietly in the landscape, its origins neither labelled nor explained for passers-by.

What makes it quietly unusual is the way it appears on two very different maps separated by more than seventy years, each recording it differently, and both suggesting that cartographers and surveyors were uncertain about what exactly they were looking at.

The 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks the site faintly as a circular embanked enclosure, with an external diameter of roughly 45 to 50 metres, and names it in the gothic lettering that the OS typically reserved for antiquities, simply calling it a fort. By the 1907 edition, the representation had shifted: the enclosure is shown only as an arc of hachures, those small hatched lines used to indicate slope or earthwork, with a chord measurement of around 47 metres running south-south-east to north-north-west, and a field bank running along its outer edge. On the ground today, the feature reads as a subcircular raised area measuring roughly 39 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west, defined by a scarp on its southern side that reaches between 2.3 and 2.7 metres in height and between 4 and 4.3 metres in width. There is no visible fosse, the defensive ditch that typically surrounds a rath (an enclosed ringfort of the early medieval period), and no identifiable entrance survives. Whether this was always the case, or whether later agricultural use has erased those features, is not recorded. A separate rath lies approximately 80 metres to the north-east, suggesting this part of the ridge was once a focus of some activity, with at least two enclosures occupying the same elevated ground.

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Pete F
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