Ringfort, Treanlaur, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Treanlaur, Co. Mayo

On a heather-covered hill in Treanlaur, a low earthen rim barely a metre and a half high is almost all that remains of a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that early medieval families across Ireland built as a combination of homestead and status marker.

What makes this particular site quietly odd is not the fort itself but what grew inside it: at some point, probably in the nineteenth century, someone built a house within the ancient enclosure, as though the old boundary still made a kind of sense as a place to settle.

The ringfort is a roughly circular platform, about twenty-five metres across in both directions, defined by an earthen scarp rather than the more dramatic stone walls associated with cashels. The scarp survives best on the eastern and south-eastern sides, where the natural slope of the hill reinforces it and it reaches a height of around 1.4 metres. To the north and north-east it has been almost entirely levelled, and is detectable only as a faint undulation in the ground, picked out by subtle differences in vegetation. Stones protruding along the top of the scarp in places suggest the remnants of wall footings roughly 1.4 metres wide, hinting that the bank may originally have been crowned with a more substantial structure. At some later point, a field wall was driven across the north-eastern interior on a roughly north-south axis, cutting through the enclosed space in a way that would have been unthinkable when the fort was in use. Abutting that wall, slightly south-east of centre, is a ruined sub-rectangular building, most likely the vernacular house, a simple one-period rural dwelling, visible on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838.

The hill setting means the views remain wide and open in all directions, which is almost certainly why the spot was chosen in the first place, whether by an early medieval farmer marking territory or by a nineteenth-century family seeking a familiar, already-cleared patch of ground. Two quite different decisions about where to live, separated by perhaps a thousand years, have left their outlines overlapping in the same small circle of heather-covered pasture.

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Pete F
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