Ringfort (Rath), Doonflin, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
In a field of undulating rough pasture in County Sligo, a circular raised area of ground about twenty-five metres across sits quietly doing what early medieval earthworks do best: surviving.
This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland, typically built during the first millennium as an enclosed farmstead for a single family or small community. The bank that rings this one is still legible in the landscape, varying in width between roughly four and six metres, and standing nearly two metres high on its eastern side, though it barely clears the ground to the northwest.
What gives the site a little extra interest is the evidence of more deliberate defensive thinking in its original design. Beyond the main bank, remnants of an external fosse, a rock-cut or dug ditch used to reinforce the enclosure, survive on the northwestern side, roughly four metres wide and a metre deep. More intriguingly still, at the outer lip of that fosse there are faint traces of what may be a second, outer bank, only about three metres wide and barely twenty centimetres high now, but enough to suggest the site may once have had a more complex, layered boundary than a basic single-banked rath would typically display. Multivallate ringforts, those with two or more concentric enclosures, are generally associated with higher-status occupants in early Irish society, and even the ghost of a second bank here is worth noting. Inside the enclosure, the ground is not flat: there is an abrupt drop in level and a slope running from west to east, which may hint at internal features now buried or simply at the natural contour of the terrace on which the whole thing sits.
The site is densely covered in overgrowth, which both protects and obscures it. The earthworks are easier to read in winter or early spring, before vegetation thickens, when the shadows thrown by low sunlight can make the banks and the hollow of the fosse considerably more legible from ground level.