Fort, Drumcashel, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Ringforts
On the floor of Glenade valley in County Leitrim, a circular enclosure roughly twenty-five metres across sits on a low north-south rise, invisible to anyone walking past it.
No earthwork bank rises above the surrounding ground, no obvious outline interrupts the overgrown terrain. What remains are scattered boulders, and the knowledge that something deliberate was once here.
The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1835 labelled simply as a 'Fort', and again on the 1909 edition, this time rendered as a circular hachured feature, the cartographic convention used to suggest a rounded, mounded form. The term 'fort' in this context almost certainly refers to a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement built predominantly during the early medieval period in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or place of habitation rather than a military fortification in any modern sense. That the feature was legible enough to map in 1835, yet is now reduced to scattered stone at ground level, points to considerable deterioration over the intervening centuries, whether through agricultural clearance, vegetation encroachment, or the gradual collapse of whatever bank once defined it. Michael J. Moore's Archaeological Inventory of County Leitrim, published in 2003, records it in this diminished state, its circular shape surviving only as a faint topographic suggestion on the valley floor.