Promontory fort - coastal, Gleann Lára, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Forts
A headland that may or may not be a fort, cut off from the mainland by a chasm that may or may not be man-made, in a corner of Mayo that is largely inaccessible anyway: the promontory at Gleann Lára is a place defined by its uncertainties.
The long, hump-backed ridge pushes westward into the Atlantic, flanked on either side by deep coastal chasms, with higher ground rising to the east. At its widest, near the western tip, the headland stretches about 30 metres across and runs roughly 130 metres in length. What separates it from the mainland is a fosse, the term used for the defensive ditch or cutting that typically guards the neck of a promontory fort, severing it from the interior. Here the fosse is 12 metres wide at the top and several metres deep, though whether it was dug deliberately or simply follows a natural cleft in the rock is not entirely clear. Outcropping stone along its edges gives the faint impression of a collapsed wall, which only deepens the ambiguity.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited the area and wrote about it in 1912, noting what he called a fairly suitable fort-site between two gullies, though he was sceptical about its age, describing the slight ditch, fence, and heaps of stones as hardly early. His hesitation has not been resolved in the century since. The interior slopes steeply southward and is scattered with rocks, but no features are visible from the mainland, and the site is considered inaccessible. It sits within a cluster of similar sites, with two other promontory forts recorded within roughly 100 metres, which hints at a landscape that was, at some point, considered worth occupying and perhaps worth defending. Whether the people who came here were building something or simply making use of what geology had already provided is a question the site keeps to itself.