Ringfort (Rath), Ardglushin, Co. Cavan

Co. Cavan |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ardglushin, Co. Cavan

What survives at Ardglushin is easy to overlook and difficult to read, which is part of what makes it interesting.

A raised oval platform, roughly 35 metres across at its longest axis, sits enclosed by an earthen bank that has been so worn down over the centuries it barely registers as a deliberate construction. What gives the site away is the fosse, the defensive ditch that rings the interior platform, which remains wide and noticeably deep even now, long after the bank above it has all but disappeared into the surrounding landscape.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside. These were typically enclosed farmsteads built during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, used by farming families as a combination of homestead and livestock enclosure. The earthen bank and surrounding fosse were as much about marking status and managing cattle as about serious military defence. At Ardglushin, a causeway crossing the fosse on the south-southwest side is thought to represent the original entrance, the point where a family would have passed in and out of their enclosed world each day. That this causeway is still traceable gives a rare sense of how the space was actually used and approached.

The site is now densely overgrown with vegetation, which both obscures it from casual view and, in its way, preserves whatever lies beneath from disturbance. Visitors willing to look carefully can still make out the relationship between the raised interior, the ditch, and the remnant bank, though it requires patience and some willingness to read a landscape rather than simply observe it.

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Pete F
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