Ringfort (Rath), Carrowhubbuck, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
At the western edge of Enniscrone village, sitting on a low rise that most people probably walk past without a second glance, there is a ringfort that has been quietly absorbed into the fabric of everyday life.
Part of it now falls within a public amenity area, skirted by a laneway. The rest sits inside the garden of a private house. The result is one of those quietly strange situations where an early medieval enclosure, once the fortified farmstead of a local family of some standing, is now divided between civic green space and someone's back garden.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when constructed from earth rather than stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They functioned as enclosed homesteads, the surrounding bank and ditch offering a degree of protection for a farming family and their livestock. This particular example is a raised circular area about twenty-eight metres in diameter, enclosed by an earthen bank some three and a half metres wide. The bank still stands to an interior height of between seventy centimetres and just under a metre, and reaches a metre on the exterior face, which is a reasonable state of preservation for a site that has been so thoroughly surrounded by later development.
The laneway that skirts the northern two thirds of the site gives a visitor an incidental view of the bank from close range, though the remainder, tucked into private grounds, is not accessible. What is visible from the public side is modest but legible, a low grassy curve that reads clearly as something deliberate once you know what you are looking at.