Ringfort (Rath), Ardabrone, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ardabrone, Co. Sligo

In the gently rolling pasture of Ardabrone, a slight rise in the ground marks out a circle roughly forty metres across, its proportions just regular enough to announce that nature alone did not make it.

This is a rath, a type of ringfort that once served as an enclosed farmstead during early medieval Ireland, probably between the sixth and tenth centuries. What makes this particular example quietly worth attention is not its scale but its layered complexity: two concentric banks of earth and stone, separated by a fosse, which is a defensive ditch, with a partial causeway still crossing that ditch at the south-east, preserving the ghost of the original entrance.

The site retains its double-bank arrangement across much of its circuit, with the inner bank measuring around two metres wide and the outer slightly narrower, the fosse between them roughly two and a half metres across. A break of three and a half metres in the inner bank at the south-east, aligned with the causeway, is where people once passed in and out. Inside the enclosure, later activity has left its own marks. A drystone field wall, curving gently east to west, cuts across the interior and crosses the inner bank at both west and east-south-east, dividing the rath into two sections as if some subsequent farmer decided the ancient boundary made a convenient starting point for his own. Two small quarry cuts are visible in the interior as well, one near the centre and another within the bank to the north-east, suggesting the stonework was raided at some point for building material. Most intriguingly, positioned just south of centre within the quarried area is a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with ringforts, used variously for storage, refuge, or both. Its presence here, half-revealed by quarrying, gives the site an air of accidental excavation, as though the landscape has been slowly turning itself inside out.

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Pete F
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