Ringfort (Rath), Skreeny Little, Co. Leitrim

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Skreeny Little, Co. Leitrim

A farm track cuts straight through the middle of this early medieval enclosure in Skreeny Little, County Leitrim, which says something about how thoroughly these sites have been absorbed into the working landscape over the centuries.

The track runs east to west across the interior, bisecting what was once a carefully bounded space, most likely the enclosed farmstead of a single family or small community living somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath when it is constructed from earth rather than stone, is essentially a circular or subcircular area enclosed by one or more raised banks and ditches. They are among the most common field monuments in Ireland, yet each one has its own particular character. This example sits on the east-facing slope of a low drumlin, the kind of rounded glacial hill that defines so much of the Leitrim terrain, and takes a subcircular form measuring roughly 32 metres north to south and 27.5 metres east to west internally. The enclosing bank is round-topped and steep-sided, standing about 0.4 metres above the interior ground level and 0.7 metres above the exterior, with a width of approximately 2.45 metres. At the north-west it has been reduced to a mere scarp. Just outside the bank, faint traces of an outer fosse, a shallow ditch that would once have reinforced the boundary, survive as a band of lush vegetation curving from north around to the south-west. No original entrance has been identified.

The interior is covered in grass and reeds, the reeds suggesting the kind of damp, low-lying ground that accumulates in undisturbed enclosures on drumlin slopes. The lush growth marking the fosse line is itself a common way of reading these sites from a distance: the disturbed or deeper soil of old ditches tends to hold moisture and feed a denser, darker strip of vegetation, making the archaeology visible without any excavation at all.

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