Ringfort (Rath), Ballindrehid, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a ridge in Co. Mayo, just below its highest point, the ground holds the ghost of a settlement that has been almost entirely erased.
What was once a rath, a type of ringfort consisting of a circular earthen bank enclosing a domestic space, has been levelled to the point where only faint undulations in the pasture hint at what lay here. The interior surface remains visibly uneven and disturbed, suggesting the ground has been worked over at some point, though the enclosure's original diameter of around 35 metres can still be roughly traced in a broad curve running north to southwest.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the rath clearly as a circular embanked enclosure. By the 1931 edition, something had shifted: a later field boundary had been drawn around the site, and only the northeastern arc of the enclosing bank was still marked with hachuring, the fine lines surveyors use to indicate a raised earthwork. The structure had already begun its slow disappearance into the working landscape. What survives more concretely is an opening to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or refuge, located in a slightly raised area roughly to the northeast of the enclosure's centre. The ridge setting would have made practical sense to its original inhabitants; the ground falls away to the northwest and northeast, offering open views across a valley of damp pasture below. Two further raths lie close by, one approximately 80 metres to the southwest and another possible example around 235 metres in the same direction, suggesting this was once a more densely occupied stretch of ground than its present emptiness implies.