Fort, Rahard, Co. Meath
Co. Meath |
Ringforts
In County Meath, a modest grass circle sits on the eastern tip of a low ridge, its edges barely risen above the surrounding land, its entrance long gone and its fosse, the defensive ditch that would typically ring an enclosure of this kind, nowhere to be seen.
A modern field wall cuts straight through the middle of it, claiming half the space for agricultural tidiness, leaving the southeastern arc as the clearest remnant of whatever this place once was.
When the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of Meath in 1836, the enclosure was recorded in gothic lettering as a "Fort", a typographic convention the surveyors used to signal something ancient and earthwork in character. At that time it appeared as a circular embanked enclosure roughly 35 to 40 metres in external diameter. What survives today is somewhat smaller, a grass-covered circle of around 26 metres across, defined by a low scarp, essentially a slight earthen shelf or edge, no more than half a metre high and a metre wide, with some stone facing still visible along its eastern and east-southeast arc. Enclosures of this general type are often described as ringforts, the most numerous class of field monument in Ireland, typically associated with early medieval farmsteads, though without excavation it is impossible to say anything more specific about the date or function of this particular example.
The bisecting field wall is the detail that stays with you. It is a reminder of how quietly these sites get absorbed into the working landscape, not demolished so much as gradually incorporated, the boundary of an ancient enclosure becoming just another line across a field.
