Ringfort (Rath), Rathurlisk, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rathurlisk, Co. Sligo

Beneath the canopy of a coniferous forestry plantation in Rathurlisk, Co. Sligo, a substantial earthen ring rises from a low hill with a quiet insistence that the trees around it are, historically speaking, very recent arrivals.

The rath here is a ringfort, one of the thousands of roughly circular enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically as farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. What sets this one apart, even on paper, is its sheer solidity. The enclosing bank measures six metres wide and stands over four metres high on its northern exterior, which puts it well above the modest proportions of many comparable sites.

The enclosure is nearly circular, running thirty-one metres north to south and twenty-eight and a half metres east to west, and it is girded by a fosse, the external ditch that was dug to create the upcast material for the bank itself, five metres wide and one and a half metres deep. On the eastern side, a gap of just over three metres in the bank, possibly accompanied by a causeway across the fosse, is thought to mark the original entrance. Inside, towards the south-west, there is a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly built within ringforts, most likely for storage or as a place of refuge. The souterrain is catalogued separately, suggesting it retains enough structure to be considered a distinct feature in its own right. Together, the scale of the earthworks and the presence of the souterrain suggest a site of some local significance, perhaps a more prosperous or better-defended household than the average early medieval farmstead.

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