Ringfort (Rath), Tonacartron, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tonacartron, Co. Mayo

In the pastureland of Tonacartron, on a west-facing slope in County Mayo, an oval earthwork sits quietly embedded in the farming landscape.

It is the kind of feature that a person might walk past without a second thought, its low bank barely reaching above knee height in places, a later stone fence laid directly on top of it as if the original builders had simply been tidying up. That layering, old earthwork below, newer field boundary above, is itself a small history of how the Irish countryside recycled its own past rather than clearing it away.

The site is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland, built during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, as an enclosed farmstead for a single family or small community. The bank here describes an oval roughly 32 metres from north to south and 26 metres from east to west, modest but not insignificant in scale. Beyond the bank, a shallow external fosse, essentially a ditch dug to provide the material for the bank itself, runs from the north-west round to the south-east, though at only about 20 centimetres in depth it has been considerably reduced over the centuries, likely by the same agricultural activity that later planted the stone fence along the top. The site was recorded as part of a local archaeological survey covering the Ballinrobe district and the areas around Lough Mask and Lough Carra, published in 1994.

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Pete F
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