Ringfort (Rath), Cartronawar, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cartronawar, Co. Longford

In a pasture field on a south-westerly slope in Cartronawar, Co. Longford, a slight rise in the ground marks the outline of an early medieval settlement that most people would walk straight past without a second thought.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed circular farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, where a family or small community would have lived within a bank and sometimes a surrounding ditch. This particular example is subtle even by those modest standards: a subcircular platform roughly 33 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west, edged by a low earthen and stone bank that drops away in a broad scarp no more than 0.3 to 0.4 metres high. There is no visible fosse, the ditch that would normally run outside the bank, and no trace of the original entrance survives.

The site appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked as a circular enclosure with the label 'Fort', which suggests it was already a recognisable earthwork rather than a functioning settlement by the time the surveyors came through. A field inspection carried out in 1987 confirmed the raised subcircular area and recorded the bank's dimensions, though even then the defining features were weathered and indistinct. Thousands of ringforts survive across Ireland, but many, like this one, exist in a quiet state of near-erasure, their outlines legible only when light falls at a low angle across the grass, or when a dry summer bleaches the pasture unevenly and the buried archaeology briefly reasserts itself.

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Pete F
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