Fort, Drummond, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Enclosures
On a south-westerly slope of a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, a small circular earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, grass-covered and ringed by scrub.
What makes it slightly unusual is not any grandeur but its company: within roughly a hundred metres there are two other enclosures of a similar character, one visible as a cropmark in the soil to the south-east. Three such features clustered so closely together in a stretch of ordinary-looking farmland is the kind of detail that tends to go unnoticed unless you are already looking.
The enclosure at Drummond is modest by any measure, roughly eleven metres across internally, defined by an earthen bank that rises to just over a metre on its southern side. Around part of its northern arc runs an outer fosse, a shallow outer ditch that typically accompanies this type of monument. A fosse of this kind served both to reinforce the bank and to mark a boundary, though whether that boundary was defensive, agricultural, or ceremonial in nature is rarely easy to determine for enclosures of this type. Much of the fosse to the north has since been absorbed into a modern field drain, a small but telling sign of how agricultural practice quietly reshapes even ancient earthworks over time. The 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map already recorded this feature as a fort, with field banks converging on it from the north-east, south-east, and north-west, suggesting it had long been a fixed point in the local field system. At the centre today stands a large tree-stump, and the bank is broken by gaps at several points, though none of these openings are necessarily original to the enclosure's construction.