Lisnahoowa, Loughaunnaman, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
Part of what makes this Mayo rath quietly compelling is how thoroughly it has been absorbed into the working landscape around it, yet still holds its shape.
The earthwork sits on a gentle, north-east-facing slope in pasture near Loughaunnaman, its roughly circular platform measuring just over thirty-one metres across. A rath is an early medieval enclosed farmstead, typically consisting of a raised interior platform surrounded by an earthen bank and an outer ditch, known as a fosse, and this one preserves that basic grammar even after centuries of slow erosion and agricultural reuse.
The name Lisnahoowa appears on Ordnance Survey maps from as early as 1838 and again on the 1916 edition, suggesting the site was a recognised landmark long before anyone thought to record it systematically. The bank, once a proper raised perimeter, has been worn down to little more than a scarp along much of its inner face, standing less than half a metre above the interior in places. The fosse that once ran around the outside has largely silted up, surviving as a faint depression most legible on the north-west and south-east arcs. A narrow raised rim along the south-west to north-west section of the bank appears to be a relatively modern addition, the result of the western half of the rath being pressed into service as a field boundary at some point, its ancient edge recut or built up to suit a farmer's need. A wide gap of around six metres on the eastern side may mark where the original entrance once stood, though cattle have since opened several additional breaks around the perimeter.
The rath does not stand alone in this townland. A second rath, now completely levelled, once occupied higher ground about 120 metres to the south-west, and a possible third example lies roughly 125 metres to the south-south-east. Whether they were contemporary or simply accumulated across generations in a favoured stretch of ground is not known, but their proximity suggests this gentle slope was considered worth enclosing and defending more than once. Today the interior is ringed thickly with blackthorn, hawthorn, and hazel, with brambles spreading inward, and the cattle that graze the surrounding field have continued what time began, steadily breaking down the bank's exposed edges.