Fort, Cartronawar, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Ringforts

Fort, Cartronawar, Co. Longford

In a field of low-lying pasture in County Longford, there is a circular earthwork that most people would walk across without realising they had crossed anything at all.

The outer bank has disappeared entirely at ground level, and what remains is modest by any measure: a raised circular area roughly 23 metres across, defined by a low bank of earth and stone no more than 30 centimetres high, with traces of a fosse, the shallow ditch that once ran around its exterior, still faintly legible in the landscape. It is the kind of site that rewards attention precisely because it demands imagination to read.

A report from 1976 described the earthwork as it then appeared: a raised circular platform enclosed by two low banks with a shallow intervening fosse between them. The original entrance is thought to have faced south-east, a common enough orientation for enclosures of this type. The inner bank survives to a width of about 2.2 metres, while the external fosse, now considerably reduced, measures roughly 1.8 metres wide and between 10 and 20 centimetres deep. Part of the reason for that reduction may not be simple erosion. The fosse on the western side appears to have been disturbed and possibly recut when agricultural drainage works were carried out, a reminder of how much of Ireland's buried and semi-buried archaeology has been quietly reshaped by land improvement schemes over the centuries. The outer bank, presumably once a more substantial feature, has been so thoroughly levelled that it leaves no visible trace.

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Pete F
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