Ringfort, Carrowreagh, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Carrowreagh, Co. Sligo

In a pasture field in Carrowreagh, County Sligo, a slight rise in the ground is almost all that remains of what was once a ringfort, one of the most common yet persistently misread features of the Irish rural landscape.

Ringforts, known variously as raths or cashels depending on whether they were built from earth or stone, were enclosed homesteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most housed a single farming family and their livestock. This one in Carrowreagh is easy to miss, and easier still to misread entirely.

The enclosure measures roughly 26 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, a modest but recognisable circular form sitting on a very gentle north-east-facing slope. Its defining feature was an earthen bank, still surviving in places to about four metres wide, though rising only around 0.4 metres above the interior ground level. What makes this particular site quietly curious is the degree to which it has been absorbed by later agricultural use. Large sections of the bank have been removed entirely, particularly along the north-east to east, the south and south-west, and the west-northwest to northwest arcs. Where the bank survives between the northwest and northeast, it has been modified and folded into a curving field boundary, the ringfort quietly pressed into service as a property line. There is no fosse, or external ditch, visible at ground level, and the original entrance has been lost completely.

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Pete F
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