Fort, Curraghfore, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Ringforts
On the crest of a drumlin at the western end of the Glenfarne valley in County Leitrim, a roughly circular enclosure sits in quiet obscurity, its grassy and reed-covered interior betraying little of its original purpose.
What makes it quietly peculiar is not just its elevated position on the drumlin, one of those smooth, elongated hills shaped by glacial drift, but the fact that nobody has yet identified where its original entrance once stood. A structure built to be entered and defended, and the door, so to speak, has been lost entirely.
The enclosure measures approximately 27.5 metres across on its north-south axis and 25.5 metres east to west, placing it comfortably within the range of a rath, the kind of circular earthen enclosure built throughout early medieval Ireland, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries, as a farmstead or a seat of local authority. A steep-sided earthen bank defines the interior, separated from a lower outer bank by a fosse, a ditch, roughly two metres wide at the base. The outer bank survives only intermittently on the south-western side. Field banks have been attached to the perimeter at both the east and west, suggesting the site was absorbed into later agricultural arrangements without much ceremony. Roughly ninety metres to the south lies a second rath, which raises the possibility that the two enclosures functioned in some relationship to one another, though whether that was contemporaneous occupation, successive use, or mere proximity is not recorded. Michael J. Moore documented the site in the Archaeological Inventory of County Leitrim, published in 2003.