Ringfort (Rath), Carrownacreevy, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Carrownacreevy, Co. Sligo

A ringfort that never made it onto any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps is unusual enough; one that has since been quietly bisected by a townland boundary wall, split between pasture and woodland, and left to be slowly engulfed by beech trees and young oaks is something else again.

This rath near Carrownacreevy sits on elevated coastal grassland roughly a kilometre south of Ballysadare Bay in County Sligo, its eastern flank sloping down through deciduous woodland while the western portion survives as a barely discernible D-shaped platform in an ordinary pasture field.

A rath is a ringfort, typically an early medieval enclosed farmstead defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Here, the enclosure measures approximately 45 metres in diameter, its boundary surviving as a low, levelled bank and scarp that varies considerably around the circuit. On the north-east arc it can still be read as a low rise, but it diminishes to a shallow uneven scarp along the south and south-west, and fades almost entirely on the north-west side where it dissolves into a patch of wet ground. A modern stone wall running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west cuts straight across the interior, following the line between the townlands of Carrownacreevy to the west and Tanrego West to the east, with no apparent concern for what lay underneath it. There are two breaks in the scarp, one a wider disturbed gap at the east, the other a narrower opening at the south, where a shallow depression just outside may mark a fosse, the original defensive ditch, though it cannot be confirmed beyond that single arc. Inside, the western half retains faint east-west linear features that may be the ghost of old cultivation ridges. The eastern half, now under woodland, is rougher, with large boulders breaking the surface and an area of disturbance in the northern interior, near which a mature tree grows over a cluster of moss-covered stones. Most significantly, a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage of the kind often associated with early medieval settlement, lies in the north half of the interior close to the enclosing bank. Relict field boundaries also cut across the rath at the south-west and east, suggesting that later agricultural activity reshaped the landscape around it without quite erasing what came before.

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