Ringfort, Barroe, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Barroe, Co. Mayo

Beneath a tangle of brambles and ferns at the northern end of a pasture field in Barroe, County Mayo, a roughly circular enclosure sits quietly folded into the landscape, its ancient stonework long since borrowed by later hands.

This is a ringfort, one of tens of thousands scattered across Ireland, the majority built between roughly the fifth and tenth centuries as defended farmsteads for early medieval families. What makes this one quietly absorbing is less what can be seen than what cannot: local tradition holds that its densely overgrown interior conceals both a souterrain and a children's burial ground.

A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with ringforts and used for storage or as a place of refuge. Children's burial grounds, known in Irish as cilliní, were used for infants who had died unbaptised and were therefore, under older Catholic practice, excluded from consecrated ground; they are a recurring and quietly melancholy feature of the Irish rural landscape, often occupying ancient or marginal sites. The enclosure at Barroe measures an estimated twenty-five to thirty metres in diameter, defined by a stone bank up to three metres wide on its southern and south-western arc, while the western and northern sections appear to have been absorbed into later drystone field walls, a common fate for early medieval structures whose stones were simply too useful to leave untouched. Just outside the bank to the south-east, a shallow depression roughly two and a half metres wide hints at what may once have been a fosse, the defensive ditch that sometimes ringed such enclosures, though the overgrowth made it impossible to confirm this with any certainty. A stream runs some eighty metres to the east.

The site sits in a thicket of hazel, hawthorn and sycamore, and the interior is so densely covered that a proper inspection has not been possible. Whatever the souterrain and the children's burial ground amount to physically, they remain effectively out of reach, preserved less by any formal protection than by the indifference of the vegetation growing over them.

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Pete F
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