Ringfort (Rath), Carrowmore, Co. Sligo

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Ringfort (Rath), Carrowmore, Co. Sligo

What makes this particular earthwork quietly unsettling is not the monument itself but its company.

Sitting in undulating pasture in Carrowmore, this early medieval rath, a type of enclosed farmstead defined by a circular earthen bank, occupies a rise in the landscape with a passage tomb just a hundred metres to the north and another roughly two hundred metres to the southwest. The person who built their home here, probably somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries, was farming ground already ancient by their own reckoning, hemmed in by Neolithic funerary monuments that were already a couple of thousand years old.

The rath itself is a National Monument in state ownership and measures roughly thirty metres across, its defining bank largely intact from the south around to the northeast. The bank varies in width from three to four metres, and the stones that protrude along its top and outer slope hint that it may once have been faced or capped with dry-stone walling, an interpretation supported most clearly on the western arc, where low, moss-covered stones still sit in what looks like rough wall footing about eighty centimetres wide. A narrow gap of around two metres at the northeast may mark the original entrance, though a broader, sunken break further around the perimeter is more likely the result of modern disturbance than a second opening. Inside, the western two-thirds of the platform are level; the eastern third dips gently toward the edge. Two shallow circular hollows in the northern interior, each around one and a half to two metres in diameter, may represent the footprints of former timber or wattle hut structures. Knocknarae Mountain, which carries its own famous Neolithic cairn, looms to the northwest, while Benbulbin and the Dartry Mountains fill the horizon to the north and northeast.

Today the southern arc of the bank has been pressed into service as a field boundary, topped with a post-and-wire fence and a hawthorn hedgerow, and a farm track skirts the outer base of the bank at this point. The eastern side is heavily overgrown with brambles and hawthorn, making the external scarp, which rises to around two metres at its tallest, difficult to read from ground level. The western perimeter is more accessible and gives the clearest sense of the monument's original profile.

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Pete F
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