Lisclogh Fort, Lehery, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
There is a fort in County Longford that you cannot see.
It sits on a low rise in pasture near Lehery, and unless you happened to consult a map drawn almost two centuries ago, you would walk straight over it without any sense that something was once there.
The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, one of the most ambitious cartographic undertakings of nineteenth-century Ireland, marked this spot as a circular enclosure and named it Lisclogh Fort. Circular enclosures of this kind are generally understood to be ringforts, the most common surviving monument type in the Irish landscape, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as enclosed farmsteads or places of local importance. This one, however, has not survived in any meaningful physical sense. At ground level, nothing remains visible. The earthworks have been levelled, likely through centuries of agricultural activity, leaving only a name on an old map and a slight rise in the land that might easily be mistaken for nothing at all.
