Ringfort (Rath), Carrownteane, Co. Sligo

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Ringfort (Rath), Carrownteane, Co. Sligo

In a field in Carrownteane, County Sligo, an earthen ring sits quietly in gently undulating pasture, its original entrance long since lost and its enclosing bank barely rising above the surrounding ground.

This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically built between the sixth and tenth centuries as a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is not its scale but its construction: the inner and outer faces of the bank, from the north-west around to the east-north-east and again at the south-west, are revetted with limestone slabs set on their edges, a detail that speaks to a certain deliberateness of build even in a structure now so reduced.

The rath measures roughly twenty metres east to west and nineteen metres north to south, making it a fairly modest enclosure. The bank is about three and a half metres wide but stands only some forty centimetres above the interior at present. There is no fosse, the external defensive ditch that commonly accompanies such structures, visible at ground level, which may indicate that none was ever dug here, or simply that the land has smoothed itself out over many centuries. The limestone revetment is the most legible surviving feature, suggesting the builders had access to good local stone and chose to use it to stabilise the bank faces rather than rely on earth alone. At some later point, a drystone field wall was built abutting the outer face of the bank on the south-south-west side, and the same wall runs up and over the bank itself to the north-west, a reminder that these ancient enclosures were frequently absorbed into later agricultural landscapes, their shapes repurposed or simply built around as farming continued across the generations.

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Pete F
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