Fort, Kibberidog, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
In the pastureland of Kibberidog, on a north-west-facing slope in County Monaghan, there is a fort that no longer exists, except on paper.
The only record of it as a visible feature comes from the 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where a small circular embanked enclosure, roughly twenty metres in external diameter, is marked in the careful gothic lettering that the OS reserved for antiquities and labelled simply as a fort. That designation most likely referred to a ringfort, the type of circular earthwork enclosure, typically defined by a bank and ditch, that was built across Ireland during the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or place of shelter. Today, no trace of any archaeological feature survives at the site; the ground is pasture, and whatever earthworks once occupied the slope have been levelled entirely.
The disappearance of this particular enclosure is not unusual in itself. Thousands of ringforts across Ireland were destroyed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through agricultural improvement, land clearance, and ploughing. What makes Kibberidog quietly interesting is the precision of its erasure: it was recorded once, in 1834, and then it was gone. The 1834 OS mapping was among the most methodical surveys Ireland had ever seen, and the surveyors who noted this enclosure were working at a moment when many such earthworks were already under pressure. Their gothic-lettered annotation is now the only evidence that anything stood here at all.