Fort, Legnacreeve, Co. Monaghan

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Ringforts

Fort, Legnacreeve, Co. Monaghan

On a south-facing slope in Legnacreeve, County Monaghan, there is a fort that exists more convincingly on paper than it does on the ground.

A circular enclosure, roughly 25 metres across, was recorded on the 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, annotated in the distinctive gothic lettering that the OS used to mark antiquities. Today, the field it once occupied has been improved as pasture, and no trace of any archaeological feature survives at ground level. The fort is, in a sense, a cartographic ghost.

What the 1834 surveyors recorded was most likely a rath, the commonplace but easily misread term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically defined by a bank and ditch, that served as a farmstead or small settlement during the early medieval period in Ireland. Raths are among the most numerous archaeological monuments in the Irish landscape, and many have been lost to agricultural improvement over the past two centuries. The Legnacreeve example fits that pattern precisely. Intriguingly, a surviving rath lies approximately 100 metres to the north-north-west, suggesting the two features may once have formed part of the same local settlement pattern, perhaps related farms or enclosures occupied by the same extended family or community. That one survives and the other does not is largely a matter of agricultural chance.

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