Ringfort (Rath), Killeenboy, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
A circle drawn in the landscape roughly fifteen hundred years ago is still just about legible in a field near Killeenboy, though the centuries have done their best to obscure it.
The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. Thousands survive across the country, but this one in County Longford has been worn down to the point where only close attention reveals what it once was.
The enclosure measures around 28 metres in diameter, and what remains of its defining bank of earth and stone is modest at best, running between three and three and a half metres wide but rising only about 0.3 metres above the surrounding ground along its surviving northern arc. Along the rest of the circuit, the bank has been levelled entirely, and the main evidence for the fort's edge is now a scarp, essentially a low step in the ground surface, standing roughly 1.3 to 1.4 metres high. A portion of the original bank has been absorbed into a field boundary, which is a common fate for these structures; farmers working the same land across many generations found a ready-made earthwork too convenient to ignore. A report from 1976 noted the remains of an external fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have run outside the bank, reinforcing the enclosure. That fosse has since been infilled and is no longer visible. The original entrance, which in an intact rath might show as a gap or causeway through the bank, cannot be identified here. Inside the enclosure, there is a small irregularly shaped depression, no more than 1.5 metres across and 0.3 metres deep, whose purpose is not known.