Fort, Lisdonny, Co. Monaghan

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Ringforts

Fort, Lisdonny, Co. Monaghan

On a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, there is a place recorded on maps as a fort, marked with gothic lettering and noted by cartographers across two centuries, that no longer exists.

By 1995, the last remnant of it had been removed entirely, leaving nothing on the ground to indicate that anything was ever there.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or residence of local significance. It appears on McCrea's Map of County Monaghan from 1793, already named and already occupying the summit of a NNW-SSE drumlin ridge, those characteristic elongated hills left behind by glacial movement that define so much of the Monaghan landscape. The 1834 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a large D-shaped embanked enclosure, approximately fifty metres across, labelled as a fort in the formal gothic script the OS used to denote antiquities. Even then, a gravel pit had been dug into its interior and a road cut across its northeastern edge. By 1907, a field bank had reduced what remained to a small quadrant. When the site was visited in 1968, that quadrant measured roughly twenty metres by ten and a half, its earthen bank still measurable at the ESE, with a base width of 3.6 metres and an external height of 1.8 metres. There was no visible fosse, the ditch that typically accompanies such an enclosure, on its eastern or southwestern sides. Within three decades, even that was gone.

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Pete F
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