Fort, Lisgillock Glebe, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Fort, Lisgillock Glebe, Co. Leitrim

In the coniferous plantations of County Leitrim, near the top of a drumlin ridge oriented north to south, a slight swelling in the ground raises itself about half a metre above the surrounding hillslope.

It is roughly eleven metres across, tucked against the north side of an old field bank, and it has been confusing people for the better part of two centuries. The word "fort" was applied to it on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1835, which described a circular embanked enclosure around twenty metres in external diameter. By the time the 1911 edition was drawn up, the same feature appeared as a D-shaped hachured outline abutting an east-west field bank, its geometry subtly altered, or perhaps just differently interpreted by a different surveyor's eye.

In Irish archaeological parlance, a "fort" of this kind usually refers to a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, consisting of a circular bank and ditch surrounding a domestic area. They are among the most numerous monument types in Ireland, yet many are poorly preserved, absorbed into later field systems or overgrown beyond easy reading. The difficulty here is that the physical evidence on the ground is ambiguous. What survives is a low, gentle rise, not the clear bank-and-ditch profile one might expect, and the relationship between this rise and the adjacent field bank complicates any straightforward interpretation. Whether the D-shape recorded in 1911 reflects an original form or simply the partial survival of something once circular is impossible to say without excavation. The honest assessment is that the exact nature of the monument remains unclear.

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