Ringfort (Rath), Ballymeeny, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
A public road runs straight through this early medieval enclosure in County Sligo, swallowing roughly a third of it beneath tarmac and roadside banking.
What survives is a raised, roughly D-shaped platform set on a gentle south-east-facing slope in pasture, measuring around twenty metres north-west to south-east and fifteen metres across. The earthen bank that once enclosed it completely is still traceable along the north-west to south-south-east arc, though a small quarry pit, about four metres across and nearly half a metre deep, has bitten into the bank on the south-south-east to south side. Where the road has cut through the south-west portion, a modern bank of earth and stone now marks the edge of the surviving area.
This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, a class of monument built predominantly between the sixth and tenth centuries as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. They typically consist of a circular or near-circular area defined by one or more earthen banks, with an external ditch, known as a fosse, providing the material for the bank. At Ballymeeny, no fosse is visible at ground level, which may reflect either the low-status character of the original enclosure or simply centuries of weathering and agricultural activity. The D-shape that remains is almost certainly a consequence of the road construction rather than an original design, and the entrance, which would typically have been a formal gap through the bank, can no longer be identified. The interior height of the surviving bank reaches only about 0.4 metres above the enclosed ground, modest even by the standards of a single-banked rath, though the modern road bank alongside it rises to 1.5 metres externally, creating an inadvertent contrast between the ancient and the engineered.