Ringfort (Rath), Lurgan, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lurgan, Co. Roscommon

When road construction work on the N5 between Ballaghaderreen and Scramoge cut through a west-facing ridge in County Roscommon, it exposed a ringfort that had left almost no trace above ground.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and outer ditch, common across early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or settlement type. At Lurgan, the enclosing fosse, a U-shaped ditch between roughly one and two and a half metres wide, survived well enough to be excavated and recorded, but its internal bank had long since vanished, seemingly pushed deliberately into the ditch at some point in the past. The only hint of where the bank once stood was a narrow, undisturbed strip of ground running along the inside of the fosse circuit, a gap of about a metre where no features had been cut, as though the original inhabitants had observed a kind of boundary even in use.

What made the excavation particularly striking was the range and quality of material recovered from the fosse fills. A possible sling-shot pebble sat at the very base, but above it lay a middle fill containing eleven sherds of early medieval pottery, a copper-alloy mount, a balance beam, a knife blade, a whetstone, and a bone spindle whorl, the last of these a small weight used to keep a hand-spindle rotating during thread-making. Higher still, the upper fill produced a silver pseudo-penannular brooch dated to roughly the sixth to ninth century, a type of decorative pin-fastener with a gap in its ring, along with a possible crucible fragment suggesting metalworking somewhere nearby. More unexpectedly, the south-east sector of the fosse contained a human burial, one of three ultimately associated with the site. Disarticulated skeletal fragments from one of the interior pits may belong to the same individual, implying the remains were disturbed and moved at some point. The interior also held a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or refuge, as well as nine pits and, to the west-south-west and north-east, four cereal-drying kilns. A network of drainage ditches around the enclosure appears designed to divert groundwater away from the interior, hinting at careful, deliberate land management by whoever occupied the site. A nearby upstanding ringfort lies about 115 metres to the south-west, and a further enclosure roughly 190 metres to the east, suggesting a wider pattern of early medieval activity across this ridge rather than an isolated farmstead.

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