Ringfort (Rath), Ballinlough, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
A few metres from the western shore of Tawny Lough in County Mayo, a gently sloping field conceals a ringfort whose earthworks have been slowly absorbed by farm life, quarrying, and vegetation over many centuries.
What gives the site its quiet interest is not any dramatic monument but the way its original geometry can still be read beneath the accumulated damage: a roughly circular enclosure some 42 to 44 metres across, its outer ditches and banks now competing with field fences, gorse, animal burrows, and the overhang of two disused quarry pits.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they are earthen rather than stone-built, were typically farmstead enclosures of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, used to define and defend a family's dwelling space and livestock. This example sits on a natural terrace, the eastward slope falling sharply to a narrow strip of damp ground at the lake edge, which would have made the position easy to defend and watch over. The enclosing bank, originally a substantial earthen ring, survives best on the western side, where it still stands about 0.7 metres above the interior. To the north and east it has been reduced to a scarp, and a section has been lost entirely where a quarry pit roughly 12 metres across bites into the northern edge. On the eastern arc, the fosse, a defensive ditch, survives as a cut terrace about five and a half to six metres wide, and beyond it a faint outer bank can still be traced as a low rim before the slope merges with the natural fall toward the lake. A slumped section of bank to the south-west may mark the position of the original entrance. Local knowledge holds that a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used for storage or refuge, lies somewhere within the interior, though the interior itself is currently level and gives nothing away.