Fort, Fallacarra, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Ringforts
On the 1835 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a small circular enclosure roughly ten metres across is marked in the distinctive gothic lettering that cartographers of that period reserved for antiquities, labelled simply as a 'Fort'.
Today, no trace of it survives at ground level in the north-south valley along the eastern bank of a stream in Fallacarra, County Leitrim. The most likely explanation is mundane: a forestry road, cut at some point after the map was made, appears to have removed whatever earthwork once stood here.
The word 'fort' on nineteenth-century Irish maps typically refers to a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly between the sixth and tenth centuries, consisting of a circular bank and ditch used to protect a household and its livestock. They are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands, yet they vary considerably in size. At around ten metres in diameter, this example would have been notably small, even modest by the standards of the type. Michael J. Moore's Archaeological Inventory of County Leitrim, published in 2003, records it on the basis of the cartographic evidence alone, the structure itself having already vanished before any field investigation could confirm its form or date.