Ringfort (Rath), Leitrim, Co. Roscommon

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Leitrim, Co. Roscommon

In a field in the townland of Leitrim in County Roscommon, a low circular earthwork sits quietly on a north-facing slope, its outline still legible in the landscape after more than a thousand years.

What gives it away is the grass, which traces a near-perfect circle roughly 27 metres across, the ground rising almost imperceptibly where the old bank once stood higher and more purposefully than it does today.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type surviving in the Irish countryside. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads, built and occupied during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and used to define and defend the homestead of a farming family and their livestock. This particular example is defined by a gapped earthen bank, between 3.8 and 4 metres wide, that survives to an internal height of just 0.4 metres, though its external face still rises to around 1.4 metres above the surrounding ground. Along much of the circuit where the bank itself has been reduced or lost, a scarp, a natural or cut edge in the earth, between 0.5 and 0.65 metres high, marks where the boundary once ran more firmly. There is no visible fosse, the encircling ditch that typically accompanied such a bank, and no discernible original entrance survives at the surface.

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Pete F
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