Fort, Mahanagh, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Ringforts
In a gently rolling corner of County Leitrim, a ring of reeds marks the outer edge of something much older.
The reeds, a band roughly ten metres wide, encircle a grass-covered earthwork that measures just under thirty metres across, and the whole arrangement sits so quietly in the low-lying landscape that it might easily be mistaken for a natural feature of the ground.
The enclosure is a ringfort, the kind of roughly circular, banked settlement that was built across Ireland throughout the early medieval period, typically as a defended farmstead for a single family or small community. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of Leitrim in 1835, the site was already being labelled simply as a "fort" in the gothic lettering that the surveyors used to mark antiquities, suggesting it was recognised locally as something ancient even then. The earthen bank that defines the perimeter is low, rarely more than a few centimetres above the surrounding ground, and in places to the south it has been levelled entirely, with the displaced material pushed onto the northern interior. That kind of disturbance, probably agricultural, is common in ringforts across the country. What is less expected is a long narrow hollow running through the interior, seven metres in length and less than two metres wide, which may be a collapsed souterrain. Souterrains are underground stone-lined passages associated with early medieval settlements, typically used for storage or as a refuge, but here no stonework is visible at the surface, so the identification remains uncertain.