Ringfort, Dromore, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
On the western edge of Dromore West village in County Sligo, a ringfort once stood in what is now ordinary pastureland.
There is nothing left of it today, and that absence is itself the story. Ringforts, circular enclosures typically formed by an earthen bank and ditch, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands. This one measured approximately thirty metres in diameter, modest even by the standards of its type.
When the Ordnance Survey carried out its first edition six-inch mapping in 1837, the enclosure was still intact enough to be recorded clearly. By the time the twenty-five-inch survey was completed between 1909 and 1912, something had changed: a trackway had been cut straight through the site on an east-west axis, bisecting it centrally. The enclosure has since been levelled entirely. The sequence visible across those two surveys captures a process that played out at countless sites across Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as agricultural improvement, road-making, and land consolidation steadily erased features that had endured for over a thousand years.