Ringfort (Rath), Lisdromafarna, Co. Leitrim

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lisdromafarna, Co. Leitrim

At the top of a south-facing drumlin slope in County Leitrim, an oval patch of grass and scrub marks the remains of an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead once ubiquitous across Ireland but now, in many cases, reduced to barely a whisper in the landscape.

This one measures roughly 35 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, and what survives of its enclosing earthen bank stands no more than 0.4 metres high on the exterior. A shallow fosse, the ditch that once separated the inner bank from an outer one, still runs around it, though both features have been worn down considerably over the centuries.

The place-name itself offers a small clue to how this monument was once regarded locally. The 1911 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels it in gothic lettering as "Lisdromafarna", the gothic script being the conventional way Irish-language or historically significant names were rendered on those maps. The "Lis" element is an Irish word for an enclosed space or fort, pointing directly to the earthwork. The site has not escaped the pressures of agricultural use: a levelled field bank cuts across the interior on an east-north-east to west-south-west line, and there is field spoil deposited within the enclosure. The outer bank has been absorbed into the modern field boundary system at both the northern and southern ends. No original entrance has been identified, which is not unusual for sites in this condition.

What makes Lisdromafarna quietly interesting is precisely its ordinariness. Thousands of ringforts survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but this one sits in Leitrim's drumlin country, a landscape of low, rounded glacial hills whose ridges and slopes were clearly valued by early farming communities for exactly the kind of elevated, well-drained position this site occupies. The earthworks are slight enough that a visitor walking the field might not immediately register what they were looking at without knowing in advance.

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Pete F
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