Ringfort (Rath), Tullnagracken, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tullnagracken, Co. Sligo

At the western edge of a modern housing estate in Tullnagracken, County Sligo, a circular earthwork sits in gently rolling pasture, largely swallowed by scrub.

It is the kind of place that new residents might walk past daily without quite registering what it is: an early medieval ringfort, a rath, of the type that once served as a farmstead enclosure for a single family or small agricultural community. Thousands of these survive across Ireland, but this one occupies noticeably commanding ground, with open views extending in all directions, a quality that would have mattered considerably to whoever chose to build here.

The earthwork encloses a circular area roughly 25.5 metres in diameter. Its defining feature is a single bank, still standing to an internal height of 1.3 metres on the northern side, though the southern arc has weathered considerably lower, down to around 0.55 metres internally and just 0.3 metres on the exterior face. The bank itself measures about 1.16 metres in width. Unlike many comparable sites, there is no visible fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanies such a bank and from which the material was dug to construct it, and no entrance feature has been identified. Whether those elements have simply vanished over time or were never part of the original construction is unclear. What remains is essentially a ring of raised earth, now heavily colonised by scrub vegetation, sitting incongruously beside suburban rooflines.

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Pete F
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