A lot of ancient cultures measured past in the terms of who was ruling at the time. So something like "from the fifth year of Bob XI's reign", could work for you. People also measured time from important events, something like "five years after the Battle of Big Valley", for instance.
You could have it be on the Fall Equinox (usually September 20 or 21, in our calender), which the vast majority of cultures were able to calculate. Sometimes people counted by the moons. There's usually about 13 full moons in a year, and each one had a specific name in some cultures. Here's a web page that lists some American examples. I have no idea how accurate this page is, but obviously you can make up your own names to follow the general idea.
How about base something off the traditional names of the moons, i.e. Harvest Moon, Hunter's Moon, etc., and say "the fifteenth day in the Hunter's Moon" or something like that? And as for the years, date it from a major event or perhaps the number of years an important personage has reigned/been in office/lived.
For example, "It was the fifth day of the Third Blossom Moon, the twelfth spring since the Red Vine bloomed on the Great Cliffs, twenty generations from the Sundering." Yeah, pls ignore the stereotypes as I am not a fantasy writer, but that's the mechanics.
There are Celtic calendar systems -- several different ones. Wikipedia has an overview herePartly, creating an authentic medieval feel, it helps to understand how different time was perceived back then. There are a lot of philosophers and historians who talk about this, but the idea of linear time was much less important in the middle ages -- people knew the cycle of the year, but the average person didn't know the number of the year, and probably not the name of the month. They thought in terms of Midsummer, Midwinter, Spring and Fall -- dates whose effects you can see -- plus some festivals kept along the way
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Take a look at the Mayan calender system. They had multiple interlocking cycles of calenders. For one of my fantasy races I used a 'year' based on the movement of the morning/evening star - which lasts around 3 or so solar years.
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You could have it be on the Fall Equinox (usually September 20 or 21, in our calender), which the vast majority of cultures were able to calculate. Sometimes people counted by the moons. There's usually about 13 full moons in a year, and each one had a specific name in some cultures. Here's a web page that lists some American examples. I have no idea how accurate this page is, but obviously you can make up your own names to follow the general idea.
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For example, "It was the fifth day of the Third Blossom Moon, the twelfth spring since the Red Vine bloomed on the Great Cliffs, twenty generations from the Sundering." Yeah, pls ignore the stereotypes as I am not a fantasy writer, but that's the mechanics.
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