Ringfort (Rath), Gortaquill, Co. Cavan

Co. Cavan |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Gortaquill, Co. Cavan

A modern road curves quietly around part of this earthwork in Gortaquill, County Cavan, without any obvious acknowledgement of what lies beside it.

The road and an adjacent field boundary have, between them, absorbed a good stretch of the monument's perimeter, so that the rath, a ringfort of the early medieval period typically used as a defended farmstead enclosure, has been quietly swallowed into the working landscape.

The earthwork itself is a raised circular area with an internal diameter of roughly 28 metres, enclosed by a substantial earthen bank with faint traces of a fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have run outside the bank. What makes this one quietly notable is its absence from the Ordnance Survey maps of both 1836 and 1876, meaning it went unrecorded through the principal mapping surveys of the nineteenth century. A break in the bank on the south-east side may mark the original entrance, a detail that can sometimes help orient a visitor to how the enclosed space was once approached and used.

The south-west to north-west arc of the perimeter has been incorporated into the field boundary and skirted by the modern roadway, so the full circuit of the bank is no longer cleanly legible from the outside. The clearest section to read would likely be away from that incorporated stretch, where the earthen bank still rises with some presence from the surrounding ground.

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Pete F
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