Ringfort (Rath), Carrickhenry, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Carrickhenry, Co. Sligo

A modest rise in the pastureland of Carrickhenry, County Sligo, conceals something that most people driving past would take for an ordinary field feature.

Beneath a modern stone wall, running along the curve of an ancient earthen bank, lies the outline of an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland roughly between the sixth and tenth centuries. Thousands of these circular enclosures survive in various states across the country, but each one repays a closer look, partly because the landscape has usually done its best to absorb them.

This particular example is a rath, meaning an earthwork enclosure rather than a stone-built cashel. It takes the form of a circular raised platform roughly twenty-one metres in internal diameter, surrounded by a bank approximately three and a half metres wide and about sixty centimetres high. Beyond that bank, the faint remains of a silted outer ditch, now only about a metre across, hint at what was once a more substantial boundary. The southeast side of the platform slopes more gently than the rest, and a gap in the bank on that same side may mark where the original entrance once stood, a common placement in Irish ringforts, which frequently faced east or southeast. The bank itself has been reinforced at some point with a stone wall, the kind of practical reuse that leaves earlier archaeology partially obscured but also, in its way, preserved.

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Pete F
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