Ringfort (Rath), Rathmore, Co. Longford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rathmore, Co. Longford

In the undulating pasture of Rathmore in County Longford, a circular earthwork sits on a gentle rise, its origins quietly ambiguous.

The raised area measures roughly thirty metres across and is enclosed by the fragmentary remains of a bank of earth and stone, now worn down to between twenty and forty centimetres in height. What makes this site particularly curious is not just its age but the question of what it eventually became: the working theory is that an early medieval rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a farmstead enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch that was the standard settlement form of early Christian Ireland, was at some later point repurposed as a tree-ring, a planted circle of trees used as a windbreak or ornamental feature on agricultural land.

A survey carried out in 1976 recorded an external fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have run around the outside of the bank, but that feature has since been infilled, most likely through agricultural activity in the intervening decades. The original entrance to the enclosure is no longer identifiable on the ground. The interior is not flat, as one might expect of a settled or levelled site; instead the ground rises noticeably from the perimeter inward toward the centre, a topographical detail that sets it apart from more straightforward examples of the type. Deciduous trees now grow along the bank, which is consistent with the idea of later reuse, though whether they represent deliberate planting or subsequent naturalisation is not clear.

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