Ringfort (Rath), Keelogyboy, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Keelogyboy, Co. Sligo

On the lower slopes of Keelogyboy Mountain in County Sligo, an early medieval farmstead quietly persists in the upland pasture, its outline still legible after perhaps a thousand years of use and reuse.

What survives is a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure that once defined the homestead of a farming family, most commonly built between the sixth and tenth centuries. This one is modest in scale, measuring about twenty metres across, with a bank of earth and stone that stands nearly two metres high on its outer face, though it has subsided to just forty centimetres on the interior. Unusually, there is no fosse, the accompanying external ditch that typically reinforces such enclosures, visible at ground level.

The rath's perimeter has not come down to us intact. Sometime after the enclosure fell out of use, a section of the bank between the west-south-west and west-north-west was removed, and a drystone field wall was built along that same line, running north to south, a practical reuse of a convenient boundary. A second drystone wall, oriented east to west, connects to this north-south wall about four metres to the north-west of the rath and presses up against the outer face of the surviving bank on its north-north-west to north-north-east side. The triangular area formed between the junction of these two later walls and the old bank has been packed in with earth and stone, suggesting deliberate modification to suit agricultural purposes. The most telling original feature that remains is a gap of about 1.6 metres in the southern bank, which preserves the position of the rath's entrance, oriented, as was common, toward the south.

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