Fort, Radeery, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
On the drumlin landscape of County Monaghan, a ringfort that survived for centuries into the modern era has since been quietly erased.
The earthwork at Radeery no longer exists; it was removed sometime after 2005, which makes the description recorded in 1968 the closest thing to a portrait of a place that has entirely ceased to be.
A ringfort, at its most basic, is an enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches surrounding a circular interior. The Radeery example sat at the south-eastern end of a short drumlin ridge, those elongated hills of glacial till so characteristic of Counties Monaghan, Cavan, and Fermanagh. When surveyors recorded it in 1968, it measured roughly thirty metres across and was covered in grass and scrub. An earthen bank defined the northern arc, standing about 1.4 metres on its outer face, while the southern side had been worn down to a natural-looking scarp. Traces of an outer fosse, a shallow defensive ditch, survived on the western and northern sides, though much of it had already been reduced to almost nothing. No original entrance could be identified, which is not unusual for sites that had been grazed, ploughed around, or otherwise disturbed over many centuries before anyone thought to measure them. What is unusual here is not any feature of the fort itself, but the simple fact that a monument old enough to appear in a published county inventory was gone within two decades of that inventory's appearance.