Knockmore Fort, Townplots, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Knockmore Fort, Townplots, Co. Mayo

What looks, at first glance, like a slightly uneven field in County Mayo turns out, on closer inspection, to be a carefully engineered early medieval enclosure, its original form still legible beneath centuries of agricultural reworking.

The site sits on a gentle rise among drumlin-like knolls in Townplots townland, and the landscape around it, rolling and quietly lumpy, gives little away about what the earthworks underfoot once represented.

A rath is a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a defended farmstead for a family of some local standing. This particular example was recorded as Knockmore Fort on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1838 and 1922, which at least tells us the name has been in use for a long time. The enclosure is broadly oval, measuring roughly 46 metres north to south and 49 metres east to west. A substantial earthen bank, around 4 metres wide and standing up to 2 metres high on its exterior face at the north-west, defines most of the circuit from the south-east around to the north, though a long section running from north-north-east to east-south-east has been levelled to little more than a low undulation. Outside the bank, traces of a fosse survive at the south-south-west and north-west; a fosse is simply a defensive ditch, and this one is roughly 3.5 metres wide. Beyond it, remnants of an outer bank can still be made out in places. On the western arc, the original bank has been absorbed into the line of a later field fence, the kind of incremental repurposing that happened to thousands of such monuments across Ireland as farming needs shifted over the centuries. Inside the enclosure, a scarp running roughly north to south divides the interior almost centrally, with the western half sitting more than a metre higher than the eastern half. Hawthorn grows along the perimeter at the west and north. A second rath lies just 165 metres to the south-east, which suggests this was once a more densely settled corner of the landscape than it might appear today.

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Pete F
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