Fort, Lisnafeddaly, Co. Monaghan

What looks at first like an unremarkable rise in the ground is in fact the remains of a ringfort, one of the thousands of such enclosed farmsteads built across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most were the defended homesteads of farming families, their earthen banks and ditches marking out a domestic world that has long since vanished.

The fort at Lisnafeddaly sits on a subcircular platform measuring about 35.5 metres from north-west to south-east and 28.8 metres across the other axis. The most substantial stretch of the enclosing bank survives along the south-western arc, where it still stands 3.3 metres high on the exterior face and reaches a width of over five metres, suggesting something originally solid and imposing. Elsewhere, the bank has been worn or absorbed into the landscape and survives only as a low scarp barely half a metre high. A short section of fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanied such banks and would have reinforced the sense of enclosure, can still be traced at the north-west, though it has been partly obscured by later field banks running across and alongside the monument. Those field banks, laid down at some point after the fort fell out of use, have been folded into the remains in a way that makes reading the original ground plan somewhat complicated. No original entrance has been identified.