Lisgortnalass, Ballynastockagh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, a neat circular enclosure is clearly marked in the townland of Ballynastockagh, labelled Lisgortnalass.
By the time later map editions were drawn, the cartographers had given up on showing the feature itself; the location is simply annotated "Lisgortnalass (Site of)", the parentheses doing quiet work to signal that whatever once stood here had already become more memory than monument.
The enclosure was almost certainly a rath, the ringfort form that was the dominant farmstead type of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks enclosing a circular area where a family and their livestock would have lived and sheltered. At Lisgortnalass, the original diameter was recorded at roughly 35 to 40 metres, and the structure sat on a hilltop with wide views across the surrounding countryside, most open to the north-east and south. That commanding position is itself a characteristic of the rath tradition; these were not defensive fortifications in any military sense, but their elevated placement communicated status and offered a degree of practical oversight of the land below. The enclosure has since been levelled by agricultural activity, but a circular area of around 45 metres in diameter can still be traced on the ground through the remnants of a scarp, a low earthen edge or slope, that rises between 0.8 and 1 metre in height. It is best preserved along the southern to north-western arc, where a slight stony internal lip, roughly 2 metres wide, survives on the west to north-west side. To the north, a modern road and its accompanying field fence have absorbed or cut across the old bank, and on the eastern side the earthwork fades to little more than a gentle curving swell in the pasture. Two straight property fences now run across the interior on a north-west to south-east axis, dividing what was once an enclosed domestic space into ordinary agricultural parcels.