Ringfort (Rath), Carrickbanagher, Co. Sligo

Agriculture has pressed in on all sides, yet the earthworks survive well enough to read as a coherent structure, the kind of thing that rewards a slow walk around its perimeter rather than a glance from a passing lane.

The site straddles the boundary between the townlands of Carrickbanagher and Lissaneena, which gives it a quietly anomalous status: it belongs, in a sense, to two places at once. A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular enclosure formed by an earthen bank and external ditch, was the typical farmstead of early medieval Ireland, occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This example encloses a circular interior with an internal diameter of twenty-four metres, surrounded by an earthen bank some two and a half metres wide. The bank stands nearly a metre high on the inside and rises to one and a half metres when measured from the base of the external fosse, the shallow ditch that once reinforced the boundary. Traces of that fosse survive on the eastern to southern arc, measuring about two and a half metres wide and just under half a metre deep. A causeway four metres wide crosses the fosse at the east, which would have been the formal entrance point into the enclosure. The interior and bank are now planted with trees, giving the site a quietly wooded character that sets it apart from the surrounding farmland.