Fort, Drumdartan Glebe, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Ringforts
In the townland of Drumdartan Glebe, on a gently west-facing hillside in County Leitrim, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly beneath years of overgrowth, its original entrance lost to time.
What survives is a double-banked enclosure, the kind of feature that tends to attract the catch-all label of "fort" without any certainty about who built it, when, or what it was actually used for. That ambiguity is part of what makes it interesting.
The enclosure measures approximately 39 metres east to west and 37 metres north to south across its outer bank, with an interior space of around 34.5 by 32.5 metres. A substantial earthen bank, between five and five and a half metres wide, defines the inner circuit, rising to a height of about 2.2 metres on the western side as measured from outside. Separating this from a lower outer bank is a fosse, the term for a deliberate ditch dug as part of a defensive or boundary arrangement, which ranges from one to 1.2 metres deep and up to ten and a half metres wide at the top. The outer bank itself is comparatively modest, running from the south-west around to the north. A modern field bank clips the fosse at the south, suggesting the land has continued to be worked around the monument for generations, gradually eroding the cleaner geometry the original builders would have intended. No original entrance has been identified, though there is a more recent gap at the north.