Cairn, Corroy, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Cairns

Cairn, Corroy, Co. Mayo

Inside a ringfort in Corroy, County Mayo, there is a scatter of stones that nobody has quite been able to explain.

A low, roughly circular concentration of stones, about three metres across, sits slightly south of centre within the rath interior, clustered around the base of two hazel trees. It has no clear structure. It may be the remains of a cairn, a burial mound of heaped stones. It may be the remnant of a building. It may be neither.

The uncertainty has a history. In 1953, a man named R. B. Aldridge visited the rath and made notes, described as sketchy, in which he recorded "signs of stone work in the centre of the rath, cairn? or building". Those unpublished notes are the earliest record of anyone paying attention to the feature, and the question mark Aldridge placed after the word "cairn" has never really been resolved. A rath, for those unfamiliar with the term, is an early medieval enclosure, typically circular, defined by earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead or place of habitation. Finding stonework inside one is not unusual in itself, but the particular arrangement here sits awkwardly between categories. It is not obviously a cairn, not obviously a structure, and the intervening decades have not clarified matters.

What remains is a small, ambiguous pile of stones in a field in Mayo, half-swallowed by hazel roots, recorded once in passing and left open as a question.

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Pete F
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