Ringfort (Rath), Finns, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Finns, Co. Longford

In a field of low-lying pasture in County Longford, barely distinguishable from the surrounding ground, lies the remains of an early medieval ringfort.

A ringfort, or rath, was a roughly circular enclosed farmstead, typically built between the sixth and tenth centuries, where a family would have lived within a raised bank and ditch for both status and security. What makes this one quietly interesting is how little of it now projects above the surface, yet how much of its original form can still be read in the landscape if you know what to look for.

The enclosure is subrectangular rather than fully circular, measuring roughly 38.5 metres east to west and 28.2 metres north to south. Its bank survives on the northern, eastern, and southern sides as a low spread of earth and stone, no more than about three metres wide and barely twenty centimetres above the interior at its highest point. The western side takes a slightly different form, defined instead by a scarp, a short stepped drop in the ground, rising between 65 and 80 centimetres. A shallow external fosse, the ditch that would once have reinforced the bank's defensive purpose, runs around the outside and is most pronounced on the western side, where it widens to nearly three metres and deepens to around 40 centimetres, though it is largely infilled now. A gap of roughly two metres in the bank at the eastern end of the southern side is thought to be the original entrance. The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a circular enclosure with an L-shaped building immediately to the north-northeast, though nothing of that structure remains above ground today.

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