Ringfort (Rath), Creevaghmore, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
On a ridge in the pastureland of Creevaghmore, Co. Longford, there is a low, roughly circular rise in the ground that most walkers would pass without a second glance.
It measures approximately 26 metres east to west and 24 metres north to south, and its edges announce themselves only as a broad, shallow scarp, dropping somewhere between 0.3 and 0.9 metres. A few large boulders sit just outside its southern and western margins. There is no visible ditch, no legible entrance, and little to dramatise what it is. That restraint is part of what makes it quietly interesting.
The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the commonest class of early medieval monument in the Irish landscape. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, their earthen or stone banks encircling a family's living space and livestock. This particular example in Creevaghmore did not appear on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in 1837, which suggests it was either overlooked or considered too indistinct to mark at the time. By the 1883 revised edition, however, it had been identified and labelled simply as 'Fort', that catch-all Victorian cartographic shorthand for an earthwork of presumed antiquity. A field inspection reported in 1976 confirmed the subcircular raised area and its enclosing bank of earth and stone, though even then the fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanies such enclosures, was entirely absent, and the original entrance could not be identified. Whether the fosse was never dug, was filled in over centuries of cultivation, or simply eroded away on this exposed ridge is not recorded.