Fort, Lisdrumgormly, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
On the southern tip of a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly at the summit, commanding the landscape in the way that such enclosures were always intended to do.
The site at Lisdrumgormly is a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that tens of thousands of Irish families occupied during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most are easy to overlook, absorbed into the rhythm of agricultural land, but this one retains a clear physical presence: a grass and scrub-covered bank, a fosse separating it from what appears to be a later outer bank, and a causewayed entrance facing roughly north-east.
The earthwork measures just over thirty-four metres across its longer axis and thirty-two metres across the shorter, making it a fairly typical example in scale. What gives it some structural interest is the layering at its entrance. The causeway, which bridges the fosse between the inner and outer banks, is nearly six and a half metres wide at its base and still stands around seventy centimetres high, suggesting it has survived reasonably well. The inner bank has a base width of three metres; the outer, slightly broader at three and a half metres, is considered probably modern in origin, meaning it may have been added or substantially reworked in more recent centuries, perhaps as a field boundary. The fosse, the ditch separating the two banks, is a defining feature of ringfort construction, creating both a physical and a symbolic boundary around the enclosed space within.
The drumlin ridge itself is worth noting as context. Drumlins are the elongated, egg-shaped hills of glacially deposited material that give County Monaghan much of its distinctive, rumpled topography. Choosing the southern summit of such a ridge for a settlement enclosure was a deliberate act, offering elevation, visibility across the surrounding countryside, and a degree of natural defensibility that the earthworks would have reinforced.