Mullaghanee fort, Mullaghanee, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
At the top of a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan sits a grass-covered earthwork that has been quietly accumulating centuries of agricultural activity around it, yet has never quite been absorbed by it.
The site is a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, formed by a roughly circular earthen bank and surrounding ditch. What makes this one worth pausing over is the clarity of its original layout despite the encroachment of later field boundaries: the entrance causeway at the south-east is still legible, the outer fosse or drainage ditch runs almost complete around the perimeter, and the bank itself stands noticeably taller on the south-east side than on the north-west, a consequence of the ridge sloping away in that direction.
The enclosure measures approximately 47.6 metres north-east to south-west and 39.6 metres in the perpendicular direction, making it a reasonably substantial example of its type. Its earthen bank has a base width of between 4.2 and 4.6 metres, and the entrance at the south-east is widened to just over four metres, with a causeway crossing the fosse at six metres across. The site appears on McCrea's map of County Monaghan from 1793 and on the Ordnance Survey six-inch editions of 1834 and 1907, confirming that it was a recognised feature of the landscape well before modern archaeological recording. A nearby rath lies roughly 170 metres to the east-south-east, and the pairing of raths in relatively close proximity is not unusual in Ulster, where drumlin country lent itself to small, dispersed farming communities during the early medieval period. The north-east perimeter has been clipped slightly by a later field bank, and part of the western to northern arc of the enclosing bank has been incorporated into an existing field boundary, the kind of quiet reuse that has preserved many such monuments while also complicating their edges.