Feaghmead Fort, Ballynalynagh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a rounded knoll in the pastureland of north Mayo, a roughly oval earthwork sits with the quiet confidence of something that has long since outlasted its original purpose.
Lough Conn glints to the east-south-east on a clear day, and the bulk of Nephin Mountain and the Nephin Beg range fills the western horizon. The elevation is part of the point: this is a site that was always meant to be seen from, and to be seen.
The earthwork is a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead dating from the early medieval period in Ireland, typically defined by one or more circular or oval earthen banks and used as a defended homestead for a farming family of some local standing. At Feaghmead Fort, the enclosing bank is substantial, ranging from six to seven metres wide and rising to nearly three metres on the southern exterior, where the knoll's natural slope lends extra height. Inside, the bank has fared less well, worn down on its inner face to something closer to a low scarp, with stone breaking through the turf in places. A narrow gap on the east-north-east side marks what was once the entrance, now partly blocked by fallen stone. There is also a shallow rectangular depression in the southern interior, roughly five and a half metres across, its floor scattered with protruding stones; what it once held is not recorded. The site appears on Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 and again from 1922 under its current name. That 1922 map shows it sitting precisely at the junction of four field boundaries, every one of which has since been erased by land reclamation, leaving the rath itself as the only surviving marker of how this particular piece of ground was once organised and understood.
