Fort, Tullynahinnera, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Ringforts

Fort, Tullynahinnera, Co. Monaghan

In a quiet corner of County Monaghan, a circular earthwork once occupied a stretch of low-lying, fairly level ground at Tullynahinnera.

It was the kind of feature that, in the Irish countryside, tends to go by the name "fort", a label applied broadly to ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland defined by a bank and ditch, within which a family would have kept their household and animals. This particular example measured roughly forty metres in external diameter, a modest but not unusual size for such a structure.

What makes this site curious is less what it was than what it has become. The enclosure appears on the 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked in gothic lettering as a "fort", which was the standard cartographic convention of the time for earthworks of apparent antiquity. Yet by 1995, a house had been built partially on the location, and nothing of the archaeological feature remains visible at ground level. The pasture shows no trace. The 1834 map, then, is essentially the only surviving record that this enclosure ever existed, a single snapshot from nearly two centuries ago preserving the outline of something that has since been entirely absorbed into the modern landscape.

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Pete F
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