Ringfort (Rath), Greaghglass, Co. Leitrim

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Greaghglass, Co. Leitrim

On a drumlin top in County Leitrim, there is a ringfort that the Ordnance Survey never recorded.

Despite appearing on no edition of the six-inch OS maps, the earthwork is there nonetheless, a quiet grass-covered circle sitting on the rounded hill as it has for well over a thousand years, noticed eventually only through aerial photography.

A rath, as this type of monument is known, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as a defended homestead for a farming family. This particular example measures 25 metres in diameter, its circuit marked by a low scarp of around 0.4 metres, with a field bank and outer ditch running along its south-western to northern perimeter. The drumlin itself, one of the countless oval hills shaped by glacial deposition across the Irish midlands and north, would have made the site naturally prominent, giving its inhabitants an elevated vantage point over the surrounding landscape. The complete absence of the site from the OS six-inch mapping series, which was compiled across Ireland from the 1830s onwards, is a genuine anomaly. Whether the surveyors simply missed it or whether earthwork survival at that time was too subtle for ground-level recording, the gap remained until aerial photographs revealed the circular cropmark or shadow from above.

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