Ringfort (Rath), Beagh Glebe, Co. Cavan

Co. Cavan |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Beagh Glebe, Co. Cavan

On the summit of a high drumlin hill in Beagh Glebe, there is a small rectangular field that was, within living memory of the nineteenth century, still recognised as a fort.

Today, almost nothing remains. The earthwork that once enclosed this site, a rath being a type of circular or roughly circular enclosure of raised earth used as a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, has been levelled so thoroughly that only a low bank along one section of the field boundary, running from east-south-east around through south to south-south-west, survives to mark where it stood.

The Ordnance Survey mapped it simply as "Fort" in its 1836 edition, which suggests the structure was still legible in the landscape at that point, even if no longer in active use. By the 1876 edition, the designation had shifted to "Site of", a quiet cartographic acknowledgement that the feature had effectively disappeared. That forty-year interval covers a period of enormous upheaval in rural Ireland, when land was being reorganised, drained, and intensively worked in ways that proved fatal to earthworks that had survived for over a millennium. The drumlin setting would have made this a commanding position in its time, elevated above the surrounding low-lying ground in a manner typical of rath placement across Ulster.

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