Ringfort (Rath), Rabaun, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rabaun, Co. Mayo

On a hilltop in Rabaun, County Mayo, a roughly circular enclosure sits in grazing pasture with the ground dropping sharply away to the east and south-east, and a stream running some seventy metres to the south.

What makes the site quietly arresting is not the view it commands, though that is considerable, but what lies beneath it: a partly collapsed souterrain, a type of underground stone-lined passage used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, running for about ten metres through the south-west quadrant of the interior. A few of its original roofing lintels remain in place, visible now only as a linear hollow in the ground.

The enclosure itself is a rath, the Irish term for an earthen ringfort, the most common field monument surviving in the Irish landscape and typically associated with farming families of the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD. This one measures just under twenty-five metres across internally and is defined by an earthen bank with stones protruding through its heather and sod covering, suggesting that it was originally revetted, or faced, with stonework. A gapped kerb of large slabs and boulders survives along the inner southern arc of the bank. Outside the main bank runs a fosse, a defensive ditch, which is relatively narrow and in places barely visible as a shallow depression; its rather vertical inner edge on the north-north-east to south arc hints that it may have been recut at some point, deepened or repaired by a later hand. Beyond that again is a broad, low outer bank, now lost on the north-western side and partly buried under a later field wall to the south-west. The main bank has itself been incorporated into a modern field fence on its western to north-north-eastern stretch, which follows the curve of the original structure closely enough to suggest that farmers have long recognised the line was worth keeping. At the centre of the interior, at the north-eastern end of the souterrain passage, a stony rim marks what may be the remains of a circular house, with low moss-covered footings extending from it towards the bank to the south-east.

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Pete F
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