Ringfort (Rath), Lettergullion, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ringforts
On the north-east-facing slope of a drumlin in County Longford, a broad circular earthwork sits quietly absorbed into the surrounding farmland.
What was once a self-contained enclosure has had part of its defining bank folded into a modern field boundary, so that the ancient and the agricultural now share the same line of earth without any clear announcement of where one ends and the other begins.
The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its outbuildings within a raised bank and, usually, a surrounding ditch. This example measures roughly 52 metres in diameter, its circuit marked from the east round to the west-south-west by a bank, and elsewhere by a scarp standing between 1.2 and 1.5 metres high. Notably, there is no trace of a fosse, the external ditch that normally accompanies such a bank, which may reflect the original construction method or simply the effects of centuries of agricultural activity on this particular hillside. The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the feature as a circular enclosure with the label "Fort", confirming that its outline was still legible to nineteenth-century surveyors, even as the surrounding landscape changed around it. A gap of approximately 3.8 metres in the bank on the south-east side is thought to mark the original entrance, the point through which the people who built and used this place would have passed daily.