Ringfort (Rath), Deerpark, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
There is something quietly melancholy about a monument that has been disappearing in instalments.
The rath at Deerpark in County Longford now survives as little more than a faint crease in the pasture, a scarp no higher than twenty centimetres tracing an arc from south-west to north-north-east across a low, east-facing rise. A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically earthen, that once defined a farmstead or settlement of some local importance, and this one would originally have presented as a substantial circular bank and ditch. Today, even that reading requires patience.
The site was recorded on the 1887 revised edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears as a circular enclosure marked simply as "Fort", the standard shorthand the surveyors used for such earthworks across the country. By 1987, when it was formally examined, it had already been largely levelled, surviving only as a slightly raised circular area of roughly thirty-five metres in diameter, defined by what appeared to be a natural scarp rather than a clearly man-made bank. A wide, shallow external fosse, the ditch that would once have complemented an inner bank, was still traceable at that point, and an area of outcropping rock sat at the centre of the interior. No trace of an original entrance could be identified even then. Since 1987, further agricultural levelling has reduced the visible remains still more, leaving only that low residual scarp as evidence that something once stood here.