Fort, Liskeabrick, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Ringforts

Fort, Liskeabrick, Co. Monaghan

There is a particular sadness to a monument that existed long enough to be measured and recorded, then vanished before anyone could fully understand it.

At Liskeabrick in County Monaghan, a circular enclosure of the kind broadly classed as a ringfort sat just east of a low summit in a gently rolling landscape. By 1968, when it was formally recorded, it was already overgrown. By 1995, it was gone entirely.

The 1968 description captured it in some detail. The enclosure measured roughly 27 metres east to west and 25 metres north to south, a modest but not unusual size for a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that proliferated across Ireland from the early medieval period onward. Its defining features were a scarp, a steep earthen slope rather than a built wall, rising from about 1.2 metres on the western side to 2 metres on the east, and an outer fosse, essentially a ditch, running along the northern edge. That fosse was wide at the top, narrowing toward its base, and about 1.2 metres deep. What the surveyors could not identify was any original entrance, which is unusual; most ringforts have at least one clear break in the bank where a gap or causeway allowed access. Whether that entrance had already been obscured by vegetation, slippage, or earlier interference is not recorded. The enclosure sloped downward toward the southeast, suggesting it had been built to take advantage of the natural topography of the rise rather than occupying dead-level ground.

Sometime between that 1968 survey and a follow-up inspection in 1995, the monument was removed. The precise circumstances are not documented, but agricultural improvement has accounted for the loss of a great many earthwork sites across Ireland during the latter decades of the twentieth century. What had been a legible, if overgrown, piece of the early medieval landscape at Liskeabrick is now simply absent, surviving only in a set of measurements and a brief written description.

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