Raheen, Ballinloughaun, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
A low circular earthwork in a Mayo pasture, half-swallowed by hazel scrub and brambles, carries a designation that hints at its layered significance.
The interior of this rath, a ringfort of earth and stone dating from the early medieval period, is recorded as having served as a children's burial ground. These sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, a practice that persisted well into the twentieth century. It is a use that transformed a much older monument into something quietly sorrowful, and the combination is not uncommon across Ireland, though it never stops being striking.
The rath itself is a reasonably well-preserved example of its type. It forms a near-perfect circle, roughly 24 metres across, defined by a bank of earth and stone that still stands between 1.25 and 1.5 metres high on the outside. Parts of the bank are faced with large stones and capped with smaller ones, suggesting deliberate construction rather than simple earthen heaping. The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1838 and 1922 under the name Ratheen, a diminutive form that may reflect its modest scale relative to larger ringforts in the region. There is damage at the south-southeast, where a C-shaped area has been quarried through the bank and into the interior, and there are two breaks or low sections in the bank at the northeast and north, one with a shallow depression just inside. A second rath sits approximately 40 metres to the northeast, making this a paired or clustered arrangement, which sometimes indicates sustained occupation or activity in a given area across generations. The ground drops away to a natural depression fed by a stream just to the southwest, a detail that may well have influenced the original choice of location.