Fort, Monintin, Co. Monaghan

What makes the site at Monintin quietly unusual is its layered construction: three distinct earthen banks, each separated from the next by a fosse (a defensive ditch), arranged around a central area of approximately thirty metres in diameter. That kind of tripartite enclosure, with bank following bank in diminishing rings, is not the standard profile of the ringforts that dot the Irish countryside, and it suggests a deliberate investment of labour in whatever this place once defended or enclosed.

The structural detail is specific enough to reward attention. The innermost bank has a base width of around 3.5 metres and stands roughly 1.2 metres above the floor of its fosse; the middle bank is only marginally narrower. Both are pierced at the east-north-east by an entrance with causeways crossing the ditches. The outermost bank is the smallest of the three, and its status is less certain. It too has an entrance facing east-north-east, but that alignment happens to suit the farm buildings that now stand to the east, and a farm lane runs along its northern and eastern edge. Whether the outer bank is original to the fort or was later adapted, or partially constructed, to serve agricultural purposes is an open question. The whole structure sits toward the eastern end of an east-west drumlin ridge, the kind of low elongated hill shaped by glacial deposits that defines much of the Monaghan landscape, and the elevated position would have given whoever occupied it a reasonable view of the surrounding terrain.