Fort, Drumbad, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Ringforts

Fort, Drumbad, Co. Longford

On a west-south-west-facing slope in County Longford, a nearly complete ringfort sits quietly in pasture, its original entrance still legible after more than a thousand years.

What makes the Drumbad example quietly compelling is how much of the structure survives intact, the bank, the fosse, and even the causeway that once carried people across the ditch and through the gateway, all still measurable in the ground.

The site is a rath, the term used for an earthen ringfort of the early medieval period, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century and used as a defended farmstead by a family of some local standing. At Drumbad, the raised circular interior measures around thirty-five metres in diameter, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone roughly six metres wide and standing to about one and a quarter metres in height. Beyond that bank runs an external fosse, a defensive ditch, nearly four and a half metres wide and close to a metre deep. At the east-south-east of the circuit, a gap of just over three metres in the bank, paired with a causeway crossing the fosse, marks where the original entrance once stood. The proportions are substantial enough to suggest this was a well-constructed example of its type rather than a modest enclosure.

The main difficulty the site presents today is not access to the field but access to the interior itself. The inside of the rath is very densely overgrown with scrub, making any close inspection of the enclosed area effectively impossible. The earthworks on the outer circuit, however, remain clear enough to read, and the entrance arrangement at the east-south-east is the feature most worth locating, where the causeway and the gap in the bank still give a precise sense of the original threshold.

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Pete F
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