Fort, Parkplace, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
There is a fort at Parkplace in County Longford that you cannot see.
No earthworks rise above the grass, no ditch breaks the surface, no obvious feature interrupts the well-drained pasture where it sits. Its existence is known almost entirely because someone mapped it nearly two centuries ago and gave it a name.
The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, one of the most ambitious cartographic projects ever undertaken in Ireland, recorded the site as a circular enclosure and marked it plainly as a fort. In Irish archaeological terms, a fort of this kind typically refers to a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across the country from roughly the early medieval period onwards, consisting of an earthen bank and external ditch enclosing a circular area of living and working space. Thousands survive in varying states of preservation. This one, at some point between its mapping in the nineteenth century and the present, has been reduced to invisibility, levelled either by gradual agricultural erosion or deliberate land clearance until nothing legible remains above ground.