Fort, Kiltycreevagh, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Ringforts

Fort, Kiltycreevagh, Co. Longford

In a pasture field in County Longford, a low swell in the ground marks what was once a defended enclosure.

It is easy to miss, the kind of feature that reads as a slight unevenness underfoot rather than anything deliberate, yet the geometry gives it away: a subcircular raised area roughly 37.5 metres north to south and 32.5 metres east to west, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone that time has worn down to little more than a shallow ridge.

This is a ringfort, or at least what remains of one. Ringforts, which were typically used as farmstead enclosures during the early medieval period in Ireland, were once numbered in their tens of thousands across the country, and many survive in comparably reduced condition. At Kiltycreevagh, the enclosing bank now stands only between half a metre and 65 centimetres high, and measures three to three and a half metres across at its base, suggesting considerably more substance in its original form. A separate low scarp, ranging from 40 to 70 centimetres in height, runs along the southern and south-western side of the site at a distance of around eight metres from the bank itself. When surveyors examined the site in 1976, they noted evidence of an external fosse, the term for a defensive ditch dug around the perimeter of such an enclosure, though that feature has since become invisible at ground level. The original entrance has also been lost, leaving no obvious break in the circuit to indicate where people once passed in and out.

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Pete F
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