Fort, Corrool, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
In the pastureland of Corrool, in County Longford, a fort has effectively ceased to exist, yet remains on record as a place of real archaeological significance.
What was once a circular earthwork, a ringfort of the kind built across Ireland during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead enclosure, has been so thoroughly levelled that nothing is visible at ground level today. The absence itself is the thing worth noting.
The site appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1837, marked plainly as a circular enclosure with the label "Fort". At that point it was presumably still legible in the landscape. By 1976, when the site was formally assessed, the monument had already suffered considerable damage; surveyors could still trace the outline of a circular bank of earth and stone, with an internal diameter of roughly 35 metres, sitting on a low ridge in what was then, as now, agricultural pasture. That faint outline has since disappeared entirely, lost to further agricultural activity in the intervening decades. A ringfort of that diameter would have been a substantial structure in its time, large enough to enclose a family farmstead with associated outbuildings, and its position on a ridge, even a modest one, would have given it a degree of natural prominence in the surrounding terrain.