Ringfort (Rath), Caddagh, Co. Monaghan

The shape itself is the first clue that something older is going on here. Most ringforts, the circular or roughly oval enclosed settlements that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands and date broadly to the first millennium AD, tend toward a round plan. The flat eastern edge of this one sets it apart, and that anomaly turns out to have a history of its own.

The Ordnance Survey mapped this enclosure in 1834, at which point the straight eastern boundary was explained by a house sitting directly along it. A building had, in effect, cannibalised part of the monument, borrowing its earthen bank as a ready-made boundary wall or foundation. By the time the survey was revised in 1907, the house had gone and the enclosure was recorded as subcircular, suggesting the cartographers were working more from the surviving earthwork than from memory of the earlier structure. What remains today is a grass-covered area measuring roughly 34 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, defined by a low earthen bank approximately two metres wide and a metre high externally, with an outer fosse, a defensive ditch, running from the south-west around to the north. The ditch is modest now, roughly five metres wide at the top and 0.4 metres deep, but it would once have made the enclosure considerably more imposing. Trees still stand along the southern and western arc of the perimeter. The original entrance has not been identified with certainty, though it may have lain somewhere along the north-north-east to south-south-east arc, where an old north-south building cut through the bank before it was eventually demolished. By 2005, the small field immediately to the north had been turned into a haggard, the kind of yard traditionally used for storing hay and grain, adding yet another layer of agricultural use to ground that has been worked and adapted for well over a thousand years.