Fort, Lisdarush, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Barrows

Fort, Lisdarush, Co. Leitrim

On a knoll above Lough Melvin in County Leitrim, there is a circular earthwork so low and so thoroughly grassed over that most walkers would cross it without a second thought.

What makes it worth pausing over is not its scale, which is modest, but its company. Within roughly eighty metres to the south-southwest lies a ceremonial enclosure, and about thirty-five metres to the west sits a mound barrow, a burial monument typically raised during the Bronze Age. Three distinct archaeological features clustered on a single northwest-facing slope suggests this quiet hillside was once a place of some deliberate significance.

The fort itself is a grass-covered, circular and slightly dished mound, measuring just over nine metres across, ringed by a fosse or berm, which is essentially a shallow ditch or levelled earthen platform, and a low outer bank. The outer bank reaches around a metre to a metre and a half in height on most sides, dropping to as little as thirty-five centimetres at the north. A faint causeway, roughly one and a half metres wide, is just about traceable at the southwest, suggesting a formal entrance point. Earthworks of this type are broadly referred to as ring forts or raths, enclosures that served as enclosed farmsteads or places of local authority during the early medieval period in Ireland, though their precise function varied considerably by site and region. Michael J. Moore documented this example in the Archaeological Inventory of County Leitrim, published by the Stationery Office in 2003, providing the measurements and observations that allow us to understand the structure in any detail at all.

The setting above Lough Melvin adds something to the reading of the site. The lake below forms a natural boundary between Leitrim and Fermanagh, and the northwest-facing slope would have offered whoever occupied this enclosure a wide view across the water. Whether the fort, the ceremonial enclosure, and the barrow were contemporary or accumulated across different periods, their proximity to one another on this particular knoll is the detail that lingers.

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