Ringfort (Rath), Lisataggart, Co. Cavan

It is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them survive across Ireland, yet each one carries its own particular logic of survival and erosion, and this one is no exception.

The site consists of a raised interior area some 27 metres in diameter, enclosed by two earthen banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. The outer bank has fared unevenly over the centuries. It remains most legible along the south-east to southern arc, but to the west and north-west it has been absorbed into a field boundary, the kind of pragmatic repurposing that generations of farmers applied to whatever earthworks happened to occupy useful ground. Elsewhere it has been removed altogether. The fosse itself is generally wide and shallow, though it deepens somewhat from the south around to the south-west and west. Most revealing is a break in the inner bank on the south-east side, which almost certainly marks the original entrance to the enclosure, the point through which a family and their livestock would have passed daily in an earlier Ireland.