Ringfort, Creggyconnell, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Creggyconnell, Co. Sligo

There is a field in Creggyconnell, Co. Sligo, where a settlement once stood and now nothing remains.

No earthwork, no raised rim, no depression to catch the eye. The land simply continues, gently sloping to the south-west across elevated pasture, as though nothing was ever here at all.

What we know about this place comes almost entirely from a single cartographic moment. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map, produced from fieldwork carried out in 1836 and 1837, recorded a roughly circular enclosure about twenty metres across. That is a ringfort, the most common archaeological monument type in Ireland, typically a circular area of enclosed ground defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. By the time the next comparable survey was conducted, in 1940 and 1941, the enclosure had vanished from the map entirely. At some point in the intervening century, the monument was levelled. Whether that happened through deliberate clearance, gradual agricultural pressure, or simple neglect is not recorded. The result is the same: a place that existed clearly enough for nineteenth-century surveyors to measure and draw has since been reduced to an absence.

This is not an uncommon fate. Thousands of ringforts across Ireland were removed during the land improvements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and many survive only as crop marks, soil stains, or names on old maps. The one at Creggyconnell does not even leave a visitor much to work with on the ground. There is no feature to find, no stone to touch. What remains is the knowledge that something was here, on this particular slope, and that the map once showed it plainly.

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Pete F
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