Fort, Cornadowagh, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
In the flat pastureland of Cornadowagh in County Longford, there is a fort that you cannot see.
No earthwork rises from the ground, no ring of stones betrays its outline, and a person walking across the field would have no reason to suspect that anything of historical significance lay beneath their feet. And yet it is recorded, mapped, and named.
The evidence for this site comes largely from cartographic history. On the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the site is clearly depicted as a circular enclosure and labelled with the word "Fort", a term the early OS surveyors applied to ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The description of the surrounding land as flat pasture with good views in all directions is consistent with where such a settlement might have been deliberately placed, since height was not the only consideration; an open horizon offered early warning and commanded the landscape. What has since happened to the physical fabric of the enclosure is not recorded, but the most likely explanation is levelling through centuries of agricultural activity, which has claimed a great many similar sites across the Irish midlands.
The gap between what the nineteenth-century map shows and what exists at ground level today is one of the quieter puzzles of the Irish landscape. Sites like this one survive as names and outlines in archives long after the soil has been turned and the earthworks smoothed away, leaving little for a visitor to find in person beyond the knowledge that something was once there.