In the summers of my childhood, you could hear a corncrake ratcheting from the hay meadow below this hill. Now that meadow is a housing estate. Where I’m standing, however, has scarcely changed. The traditional stone gateposts may have slumped a little, but even in those days their caps were long gone. I’m in Drumkeen, a townland near the border of south-west Northern Ireland. Townlands are a small land division of Gaelic origin. The term’s usage survives in part because of the loyalty that townlands inspire – often above that of parish or county.
I’m on my way to a fairy fort – the remains of a ringfort, or rath, which mostly date from the medieval period. They’re circular earthen structures, comprising a raised bank behind a shallow ditch, and usually surrounded by trees. Raths enclosed a settlement, and may have protected people and livestock against raids by neighbouring clans. Fermanagh is full of them, perched atop the county’s many drumlins. Some, like those in the nearby townlands of Monavreece and Letterboy, are bivallate – that is, they have two raised banks, one inside the other. Letterboy’s rath is huge. You could drive teams of horses between its ramparts and hold a hundred head of cattle within.
The rath I’m here for is more modest. Even so, in my childhood winters, when I would race against the after-school dusk to get the dog walked, it was my winner’s enclosure. Memory drags my gaze across to another nearby summit. My stomach flutters. I recall when the hill’s former owner obliterated its fairy fort: a taboo act. To provoke the fairies – envoys of the supernatural that included our ancestors and their druids – was to dice with fate.
I walk on through empty pasture. Its hedgerows are dominated by beech trees, originally planted to gentrify the area when it belonged to the Blennerhasset estate. A graceful circle of them guards the fort. The hawthorn sentry at a gap in the rampart lets me enter. I touch a thorny twig in thanks. On my approach to the mound that marks the rath’s navel, a tizzy erupts. I look up through the branches – and meet the fairy’s glare. Her yellow-and-blue gauze flickers; and the blue tit skims away.
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