Fort, Keeloge, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Ringforts

Fort, Keeloge, Co. Leitrim

Most ringforts announce themselves with some authority, a raised bank, a clear ditch, perhaps the ghost of an entrance gap.

The one at Keeloge in County Leitrim offers considerably less. What survives is a circular platform barely rising above the surrounding ground, measuring roughly 26 metres across and lifting only between 0.4 and 0.8 metres above the adjacent terrain. Around its edge, the faint trace of a fosse, the shallow external ditch that once helped define the enclosure, can still be read at a base width of just 0.65 metres. Where the original entrance once stood, nobody has yet been able to say.

The site sits in the kind of landscape that Leitrim does quietly and persistently: low-lying ground tucked between drumlins, those rounded hills of glacial till that give the county its corrugated character. Ringforts of this type were typically the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, used roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, with the surrounding bank and ditch serving as a boundary against livestock straying and, to some degree, against human interference. At Keeloge, both the bank and the fosse have been reduced to the slightest of impressions, the platform now covered in grass and rush, blending into a wet, ordinary field. It is the kind of place that rewards a slow look rather than a quick glance.

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Pete F
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