Ringfort (Rath), Cloonacannana, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
A road clips the northern edge of this ancient enclosure in Cloonacannana, Co. Mayo, shearing away part of the earthwork that once defined it.
Known locally as Listerlahan, the site is a rath, an early medieval ringfort built as a raised, roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically used as a defended farmstead. What makes this one quietly peculiar is the contrast between the mundane pressures of modern life closing in around it and the stubborn persistence of the structure itself, its grassy interior still ringed by hawthorn, the scarp still visible from the road that partly destroyed it.
The rath measures roughly 25 metres east to west and 24 metres north to south, defined by an earthen scarp that stands only about 0.4 metres high for most of its circuit. At the northern and north-eastern arc, however, the scarp rises considerably, to around 2.2 metres, partly because the natural ground falls away sharply in that direction towards a stream that marks the townland boundary. At the north, where the road cuts through, the scarp drops in an almost vertical face, a clean scar left by road construction. A 1919 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows what appears to be an outer fosse, a defensive ditch, curving around the south-western arc of the rath, but this feature has since disappeared from the landscape. More intriguing is a semi-circular hollow near the northern interior, roughly 6.8 metres across and 0.6 metres deep, sitting immediately inside the enclosing scarp. Local accounts mention that an opening was once visible in the exterior face of the scarp just below this depression. This is potentially the entrance to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber often associated with early medieval settlement sites in Ireland, used variously for storage, refuge, or concealment. A separate semi-circular area has also been dug out of the scarp on the southern side, though the purpose or date of that intervention is not recorded.
The site sits in pasture on level ground, with a derelict farmstead in the adjoining field to the north-east and a modern cottage and garden immediately to the south-west. The hawthorn that rings the interior is a detail worth noting; hawthorn growing around a rath is not uncommon in Ireland and in folk tradition such trees were treated with considerable wariness, associated with the otherworld and best left undisturbed.