Ringfort (Rath), Killyleck, Co. Monaghan

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Killyleck, Co. Monaghan

At the top of a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, there is a circular earthwork that most people would walk across without recognising it for what it is.

The ground rises gently, levels off, and beneath the grass and rushes lies the faint geometry of an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead once common across Ireland, built by a family of some local standing to protect their household and livestock. What remains here is a platform roughly 28 metres in diameter, with the ghost of a surrounding bank still just about legible at around half a metre in height. There is no visible fosse, the term for the external ditch that typically accompanied such a bank, and no discernible entrance.

The site sits on a north-south drumlin ridge, those elongated hills left behind by retreating glaciers and so characteristic of the Monaghan landscape. It was recorded as a circular earthwork on a revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map dated 1858, itself an update of an 1834 survey, which places it among the earlier documented examples of such features in the county. A later field bank running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east cuts across the eastern side of the perimeter, a common fate for ringforts that survived long enough to be absorbed into the patterns of post-medieval agriculture. That truncation tells a quiet story about changing land use across several centuries, the original enclosure gradually losing its meaning and its edges to whoever was farming the ground afterwards.

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Pete F
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