Fort, Annaghmore, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
In the bogland of County Longford, a circular enclosure has been gradually disappearing into the landscape for centuries, its outline now more legible from the air than from the ground.
What was once a rath, an early medieval ringfort defined by a raised earthen bank and an outer ditch known as a fosse, has been slowly absorbed by the field system around it, its edges redrawn as farm boundaries rather than defensive perimeters.
The site appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked simply as "Fort", a label that cartographers of the period applied routinely to these circular enclosures found across Ireland. The same outline was recorded again on the twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey plan surveyed in 1911, still showing the characteristic bank-and-fosse arrangement. By the time of a physical inspection in 1976, the picture had already changed considerably. A substantial stretch of earthen bank remained visible at the south and west, but it had been incorporated into modern field fences, pressed into service as a boundary rather than preserved as an antiquity. A ditch on the south side of the bank appeared to trace the original fosse. The eastern half of the rath survives today primarily as a curving field boundary visible in aerial photography, while the western half shows up only as a cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in growing vegetation that betrays buried features beneath the soil when viewed from above.
The setting itself is telling. The rath sits in pasture land surrounded by bog, a combination that would have made it a conspicuous and defensible position in the early medieval period, when such enclosures typically served as the fortified farmsteads of local landowners or minor chieftains. The bog, which may have protected the site from agricultural disturbance for a long period, has not ultimately saved it from the creeping logic of field division.