Fort, Lattacrom, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
On a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, a circular earthwork once occupied the central of three summits, measuring somewhere between forty and forty-five metres in external diameter.
Today, standing in the pasture above Lattacrom, there is nothing to see. The ground gives no hint of what was once mapped, named, and remembered.
The enclosure appears on the 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked in the gothic lettering that cartographers of the period reserved for antiquities, with the single word "fort". In Irish archaeology, a fort of this kind typically refers to a ringfort, a circular embanked or ditched enclosure used during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, most often as a farmstead or defended settlement. The Lattacrom example was also recorded in local oral tradition, collected as part of the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Manuscripts scheme, a 1930s project in which schoolchildren across Ireland gathered place-name lore and local memory from older community members. That the name and the association with a fort survived in living memory into the twentieth century suggests the feature was still legible in the landscape, or at least in the imagination, long after it faded from the ground itself. At some point between the making of that 1834 map and the present, the earthwork was levelled entirely, leaving only pasture.