Ringfort, Clogher Beg, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
In the rocky pasture of Clogher Beg, in County Sligo, there is a ringfort that cannot be seen.
Not hidden behind a wall or obscured by a modern building, but simply gone from the surface of the earth, swallowed by thorn bushes, small trees, and the slow work of time on thin, stony ground. A ringfort is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead and place of shelter. This one measures approximately twenty metres in diameter, which places it at the modest end of the scale, the kind of enclosure a single farming household might once have called home.
What makes its history traceable at all is the gap between two Ordnance Survey maps. When surveyors first mapped this part of Sligo in 1837, nothing was marked here. By the 1912 edition of the same six-inch map series, a hachured circular area had appeared, those fine radiating lines cartographers used to indicate an earthwork or raised feature on the ground. Something was legible in the landscape then that had either been missed earlier or had only recently become recognisable as a distinct monument. Now, even that outline has gone. The slight rise on which it sits, in an area of rocky poor pasture, gives no indication at ground level that anything lies beneath.