Ringfort (Rath), Cloonrollagh, Co. Roscommon

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cloonrollagh, Co. Roscommon

In the undulating farmland of Cloonrollagh, a low earthen ring sits quietly absorbed into the surrounding fields, its southern perimeter now indistinguishable from an ordinary field boundary.

What was once a deliberate enclosure has, over centuries, been stitched into the agricultural fabric of County Roscommon so thoroughly that a casual eye might miss it entirely.

A rath is a type of ringfort, the most common archaeological monument in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch enclosing a domestic settlement from the early medieval period. This particular example appears on both the 1837 and 1915 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately 32 metres. What survives on the ground is a low bank running from west through north to east, measuring around 30 metres across its east-west span. The bank is modest in scale, rising just 0.3 metres on its interior face and 0.9 metres externally at its northern arc, and has at some point been overlain by a drystone wall roughly a metre high and 0.8 metres wide. There is no visible fosse, which is the outer ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks, and no identifiable entrance survives. The southern side of the enclosure has been replaced entirely by an east-west field bank, suggesting the original boundary was simply repurposed rather than demolished. The interior is overgrown. A second earthwork lies approximately 130 metres to the north, hinting that this was once a more populated corner of the landscape than it appears today.

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