Ringfort (Rath), Ballard, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballard, Co. Sligo

What makes this particular enclosure in Ballard, County Sligo quietly arresting is the way it has survived less by strength than by subtlety.

A rath, or ringfort, is a roughly circular earthen enclosure used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead and homestead, typically defended by a bank and an outer ditch. Here, though, there is no ditch at all, and the defences are strikingly uneven: in some directions little more than a low lip of earth and stone, scarcely a quarter of a metre high, while on the south-western to northern arc the land simply drops away in a natural scarp nearly three metres tall. That scarp does the heavy lifting, turning the gentle rise in the pasture into something with real presence on the ground.

The site sits on that rise amid undulating farmland, its raised interior measuring roughly 33 metres north to south and just under 32 metres east to west, making it a fairly standard size for a rath of this kind. The enclosure is not perfectly consistent in how it presents itself. To the north and south, a low bank of earth and stone, about three metres wide, marks the boundary. To the east, what survives is a linear bank, the last fragment of a field boundary that was otherwise levelled long ago, absorbed into the agricultural landscape around it. A stone-lined gap in the south-western bank, about 1.2 metres wide, may represent the original entrance. Two shallow pits, one just outside the site to the south and another within the south-western interior, are noted but unexplained. Whether they relate to the original occupation of the site or to much later activity is not recorded.

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Pete F
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