Fort, Skreeny, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Ringforts
On the north side of the Glenfarne valley in County Leitrim, on the south-west-facing slope of a drumlin, a circular earthwork sits largely swallowed by vegetation.
It is the kind of place that rewards careful looking: a raised bank, a shallow ditch, and an entrance gap that together sketch the outline of a rath, the term used for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. These were typically enclosed farmsteads, home to a family of some local status, and they are scattered across the Irish countryside in their thousands. What makes this one quietly notable is not any individual feature in isolation, but the density of similar monuments in its immediate vicinity.
The fort itself is a roughly circular enclosure with an internal diameter of around 28 metres. Its defining earthen bank is round-topped, surviving to an external height of about one metre on the south-west side, with a shallow outer fosse, a defensive ditch, still traceable on the west. An entrance nearly three metres wide opens on the west-south-west. On its own, this is a fairly modest earthwork; overgrown and unexcavated, it gives little away about who built it or when they lived here. But two further raths sit within easy walking distance: one approximately 90 metres to the north, another around 60 metres to the south-west. Three ringforts clustered so closely together suggest that this corner of the Glenfarne valley was a settled, perhaps relatively prosperous, early medieval landscape, with neighbouring enclosures possibly belonging to related families or successive generations farming the same drumlin terrain.