Ringfort (Rath), Aughris, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Aughris, Co. Sligo

Beneath a quietly unremarkable stretch of pasture at Aughris in County Sligo, a stone sculpture was found inside a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used for storage or refuge.

That discovery, passed down through local memory rather than excavation report, gives this otherwise modest site an unusually suggestive quality. The rath itself is barely legible on the ground: a slightly raised circular area of roughly 22 metres in diameter, with an earthen bank surviving only along the south-west to north-west arc. That bank stands about 1.6 metres on its outer face and just 0.8 metres on the inside, with a short stretch of fosse, a defensive ditch, cut into the ground at its north-western foot. The eastern two-thirds of the enclosure have been levelled entirely, leaving only a faint trace in the turf.

What makes the site quietly anomalous is its absence from the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the great nineteenth-century cartographic record that captured so many earthworks across Ireland. Whether it had already been partially destroyed by then, or simply went unnoticed, is unclear. The opening to the souterrain lies adjacent to the inner face of the surviving bank at the north-west, and it was somewhere within that underground chamber that a stone sculpture came to light, though the precise circumstances and date of the find are unrecorded. A second rath sits roughly 100 metres to the south-west, suggesting this corner of Aughris once carried more of a settled early medieval presence than the ploughed-down landscape now implies. Paired or clustered ringforts are not uncommon in Ireland, and their proximity often points to the same farming community or extended family group using adjacent enclosures across generations.

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