Fort, Drollagh, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Ringforts

Fort, Drollagh, Co. Monaghan

On a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, a D-shaped enclosure sits just off one of two summits, its earthen bank so worn and overgrown that it barely announces itself from the surrounding grass and scrub.

What gives the site away, if anything, is the geometry: roughly 50 metres along one axis and 40 along the other, with a waterlogged fosse, essentially a defensive ditch, still tracing its curve around the northeastern and southern sides. The outer ditch has since been recut as a field drain, which says something about how quietly these monuments get absorbed into the working landscape over the centuries.

The enclosure belongs to a broad category of earthen ringforts and enclosures common across Ireland, where a bank and ditch defined a domestic or defensive space, typically in the early medieval period, though without excavation it is impossible to assign a precise date to this particular example. The bank itself, measured at the north-northeast, is modest: just over five metres wide, with an internal height of only 0.2 metres and an external height of 1.7 metres, that difference reflecting how much the interior has silted and settled over time. A field bank running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast cuts across the western side, and beyond that boundary the monument does not survive, suggesting that later agricultural activity has erased whatever once extended there. The only entrance visible today is at the southeast, and the absence of any other break in the bank means it may well be original rather than a later convenience.

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Pete F
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