Ringfort (Rath), Culleens, Co. Sligo

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Ringfort (Rath), Culleens, Co. Sligo

What makes this particular rath, or earthen ringfort, worth a second look is not its size but what survives inside it.

Most ringforts present a simple enclosed space, a circular bank and ditch marking out a farmstead from early medieval Ireland. This one, on a gentle east-facing slope just below the crest of a north-south ridge near Culleens, holds something more: a low internal dividing wall cuts the enclosed area almost exactly in half, and clustered around it are the faint traces of a hut site, a subrectangular hollow, and a shallow subcircular depression. The earthwork as a whole measures roughly 32 metres across, enclosed by a bank up to 5.5 metres wide, with hints that its inner face was once lined with stone.

The site appears on the 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the name Roycloghany, a placename that has since faded from common use. The external fosse, the water-filled or dry ditch that typically runs outside the enclosing bank of a rath, is still readable on the south-east side, though it has almost entirely disappeared on the west. A two-metre gap in the eastern bank is thought to mark the original entrance, which would have faced the slope's natural downhill aspect. The internal bank running roughly northwest to southeast is only about 20 centimetres high today, barely more than a ripple in the pasture, yet it divides the interior with unusual deliberateness. The square hut site abutting it, around four metres across and defined by the scarcest remains of a low wall along its north and south sides, suggests the enclosure was once a working domestic space rather than a purely defensive one.

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