Fort, Park, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Ringforts
On a low hillock in the townland of Park, County Leitrim, there sits a grass-covered enclosure that resists easy interpretation.
It is roughly subcircular in shape, measuring around twenty metres north to south and seventeen metres east to west, and defined not by a wall or ditch in any obvious sense but by a stone-covered scarp, a sloping earthen edge reinforced with stone, that rises from roughly half a metre at its northern side to one and a half metres at the south. No original entrance can be identified, and whatever facing-stones may once have dressed its interior surface have long since disappeared into the hillside or been taken for use elsewhere.
Structures of this kind are generally understood as enclosure forts, a broad category of monument found across Ireland, where a raised or banked perimeter defined a domestic or defensive space, sometimes surrounding a family farmstead of the early medieval period. The variation in the scarp height here, considerably more pronounced at the southern side, may reflect how the original builders adapted their construction to the natural contours of the hillock, building up more on the downslope to create a level or commanding interior. Without visible stonework or a traceable entrance, though, much about this particular site remains open to question. It was recorded in Michael J. Moore's Archaeological Inventory of County Leitrim, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 2003, which remains one of the more systematic attempts to catalogue the county's considerable stock of field monuments.