Ringfort (Rath), Srananooan, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Ringforts
Near the top of a south-facing drumlin slope in County Roscommon, a roughly circular patch of grass and rushes marks the remains of an ancient ringfort, and one of its more curious features is that no entrance can be identified at all.
The earthwork is nearly perfectly round, measuring about 25 metres across, and yet whatever gap once allowed people and livestock in and out has been entirely obscured by time, livestock poaching, or later agricultural interference.
A ringfort, known in Irish as a rath, was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a family farmstead within a bank and, often, a surrounding ditch or fosse. This example sits near the summit of a drumlin, one of those smooth, whale-backed hills of glacial till that characterise the drumlin belts of Connacht and Ulster, and the elevated south-facing position would have offered decent drainage and a long view of the surrounding land. The enclosure is defined along its northern side by an earthen bank about four metres wide, though it rises only marginally above the interior and a little more on its outer face. Elsewhere the boundary survives mainly as a scarp, a low step in the ground, which drops between roughly half a metre and less than a metre depending on where you measure. A fosse, a shallow external ditch, survives most clearly on the north to north-east arc, where it is about two to two and a half metres wide and thirty centimetres deep, with only faint traces continuing around the rest of the circuit. The monument has not come through the centuries entirely intact: a field bank running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west cuts across its south-eastern edge, a reminder of how readily later land division overrode earlier boundaries. A second rath lies approximately 200 metres to the north, suggesting that at some point this part of the drumlin landscape supported more than one settled household in relatively close proximity.