Ringfort (Rath), Carrowhubbuck, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Carrowhubbuck, Co. Sligo

A quarry hole punched through an ancient earthen wall is not the usual way to encounter a ringfort, but at Carrowhubbuck in County Sligo that is precisely what has happened.

On the western side of this oval enclosure, a pit measuring roughly nine metres by seven has been cut straight through the bank and into the interior, leaving the surrounding structure visibly incomplete. It is a small, quiet illustration of how sites like this have been treated as convenient sources of material long after their original inhabitants were forgotten.

The site is a rath, the most common type of early medieval farmstead in Ireland, typically a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, within which a family would have lived and kept livestock. This example sits at the southern edge of a ridge of high ground in undulating pasture, a position that would have offered reasonable visibility over the surrounding landscape. The enclosed area is roughly 38 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west. What survives of the bank on the south and west sides stands between one and 1.2 metres in external height and runs three to four metres wide, which gives some sense of what the full circuit would once have looked like. To the north the bank has been levelled entirely, and to the east it has been worn down to a scarp that merges gradually with the natural slope of the ridge, making it easy to miss unless you are looking for it.

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