Ringfort (Rath), Ardogelly, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
Most ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads that were the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, consist of a single earthen bank and ditch.
The rath at Ardogelly in County Sligo goes considerably further than that. What survives in a field of pasture here is a concentric system of at least two, and possibly three, defensive earthworks wrapped around a raised oval interior, the whole arrangement sitting on a naturally-occurring rise in the ground that would have given its occupants a commanding view of the surrounding landscape.
The innermost enclosure is an oval measuring roughly 29.6 metres east to west and 26.8 metres north to south, ringed by a substantial earthen bank that still stands 3.1 metres above the base of the external fosse on its north side. That fosse, a wide ditch dug to increase the apparent height of the bank above it, is itself 3.5 metres across. Beyond it sits a second bank, broader and still standing to around two metres on its outer face, with what appears to be a further infilled fosse at its foot. At the north and east edges, a modern field boundary follows a line that may originally have been a third bank, though it has been levelled to the south and west. The original entrance can still be read as a deliberate gap in the earthworks, roughly three metres wide in the inner bank and two metres wide in the outer, positioned on the east side. Stones visible in the inner face of the inner bank may be the remnants of a stone kerb or facing that once lined it. Local tradition holds that a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind often used for storage or refuge, lies somewhere beneath the interior. A separate mound survives about thirty metres to the south-south-east, its relationship to the rath unexplained but presumably not coincidental.
The layered defences at Ardogelly suggest either a site of unusual importance or one that was elaborated over time, and the possibility of a third outer circuit, now partly absorbed into a farm boundary, makes its original extent genuinely difficult to reconstruct. Whatever once stood inside the enclosure has long since vanished into the turf, but the earthworks themselves remain legible enough to trace the logic of the whole design.