Rathnaguppaun, Sranalaghta, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a ridge in County Mayo, where the ground begins to fall away towards boggy lowland, sits a circular earthwork that has been quietly occupying the same patch of pasture for well over a thousand years.
Its perimeter is ringed with hazel, blackthorn, and hawthorn, giving it a distinctly bounded, almost deliberate quality in the open field. The interior, by contrast, is level and entirely featureless, offering no obvious explanation for why someone chose this particular spur of ground.
The site is a rath, sometimes called a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. These were typically the enclosed farmsteads of farming families, their earthen banks serving as much to define status and territory as to provide any serious defence. This example is a roughly circular platform, measuring around 25 metres across, bounded by a bank of gravelly earth that rises nearly 1.7 metres on its outer face. A few stones protrude from the inner face of that bank, possibly the remnants of a stone kerb or facing that once gave the structure a more formal finish. A gap of around three metres on the south-south-east side is thought to mark the original entrance. The site appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1838 and 1922 under the spelling "Rathnaguppan", suggesting continuous local awareness of the monument even as it passed from active use into agricultural land. What makes the location particularly interesting is its immediate neighbours: a second rath lies roughly 90 metres to the south-south-west, and a standing stone stands just 80 metres to the west. The clustering of monuments of different types and likely different periods around the same ridge implies that this corner of Sranalaghta was considered significant ground across a considerable stretch of time.
