Ancient Neighbors

The Irish government relaxed travel restrictions this week. We can now travel 5km for exercise and shopping. We won't be able to travel more than 20 km until mid-July. If all goes well. 

Because of the increased travel limit this week, for the first time in months I could drive to the dune outside of Dunfanaghy and walk to one of my favorite hilltops. It's near the medieval souterrain I wrote about previously. I love those mountains, the seven sisters. Muckish on the left, and Errigal on the far right, and I think the three in the middle Ardloughnabrackbaddy, Aghla More and Aghla Beg, but I'm not sure.

They always lift my heart. I've missed seeing them. 

The next day I walked to that red dot on the map below, labeled "Fort." I have been trying to find it since we moved to Dunfanaghy, and I finally found a route. 

A ring fort isn't a fort in a military sense. "Farmstead" is probably a more accurate word, built by people to protect their livestock from raids and wolves. Irish people lived in them for thousands of years, up to the middle ages.

When a ring fort is built of stone, like they are in Donegal, archeologists use the term "cashel." The painting below shows a cashel similar to Ballymore ring fort.

See more of Philip Armstrong's history paintings at his website. 

Cashels are contemporary with their much more numerous raths and date from mostly the Irish Early Christian period (c500-1000AD), the main difference being that they were mostly confined to rockier areas and were therefore stone built. 

The buildings inside were also more than likely stone built with thatched roofs. Philip Armstrong.

The archeology survey describes the ring fort like this:

Townland: BALLYMORE LOWER
Description: Internal diam. c. 45m NNW-SSE, c. 23m ENE-WSW. An oval area enclosed by a collapsed stone wall up to 1m in height and originally 1.95m wide. Externally to the E and Ware sharp drops. Internally on the W side is a 4m square structure of collapsed stone walls now 3m wide. There is a gap in this collapse at the SE corner. Just N of this structure a slab 1.7m long projects out of the ground. The site is located on a NE-SW hill overlooking the Back Strand, in rough pasture and in a commanding position.

I know these tiny videos are ridiculous, but maybe you can sense the "commanding position." 

Even if the videos were larger it is impossible to capture the subtle contours of a ring fort in a 2D image.

This is the center of the ring fort, looking east. You can see the slope of the northern and southern walls. I could not discern the "rectangular structure" mentioned in the archaeology report, nor the long slab.

Here is what our house looks like from inside ring fort.

The fourth edge, to the south, is a steep ravine. The ravine is odd, in that there is no stream at the bottom or obvious reason for how geologic forces formed it perpendicular to the ridge. I wonder if it is what remains of a man-made moat. 

You can sort of see the southern ravine to the right of the ring fort in this photo I took from the ridge behind our house. 

I spend a lot of time looking over this valley. "In these difficult times" it is comforting to see houses of neighbors, ancient and modern. I imagine my neighbors enjoying these same sunsets, the same corncrakes, the same joy at simply climbing a hill and seeing a mountain against the sky.