Ringfort (Rath), Rathscanlan, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rathscanlan, Co. Mayo

At the eastern tip of a ridge in County Mayo, an early medieval ringfort sits at the precise point where level ground gives way to steep slopes dropping away on three sides.

Ringforts, or raths, were typically the enclosed farmsteads of early Irish farmers and landowners, built roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. What makes this one quietly interesting is not just its commanding position over a north-south stream valley to the east, but that a second rath sits along the same ridge about 140 metres to the west at its summit, the two forming an unusual pair on the same spine of high ground.

The enclosure is oval, measuring roughly 22 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south. On its western side, an earthen bank still survives in reasonable condition, around 2.9 metres wide and standing about 0.6 metres above the ground outside it. Elsewhere the bank has been reduced to a scarp, a simple slope in the earth rather than a raised bank, and at the eastern side even that is dilapidated and poorly defined, with part of the ridge slope having been dug away at some point. The ghost of a filled-in fosse, the external ditch that would once have added an extra layer of enclosure, can still be traced along the southern and western sides. An outer bank that appeared as an arc on the 1919 Ordnance Survey six-inch map has since been removed entirely. No entrance survives with any clarity, though the lowest section of the scarp on the east-southeast side is the most likely candidate. Inside the southern half of the enclosure there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge. The 1919 OS map, with some pragmatic vagueness, simply marks it as "Cave".

The perimeter is densely overgrown with blackthorn, hawthorn, hazel and brambles, which also push inward across the north-eastern quarter of the interior. A trackway cut into the steep eastern slope of the ridge skirts the outside of the rath, following a contour line roughly north to south partway down the slope, a detail that hints at a longer history of movement through this particular corner of the landscape.

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