Ringfort, Cashel, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a ridge above Curraghfin Lough in County Mayo, there is a field where nothing in particular seems to have happened.
The grass is unremarkable. The ground is level. And yet, according to local knowledge, this is the site of a ringfort, one of the circular earthen or stone enclosures that once served as farmsteads and homesteads across early medieval Ireland, built by ordinary farming families rather than kings or warriors, and scattered so thickly across the Irish landscape that tens of thousands of them survive. This one does not.
What makes the site genuinely curious is its near-total absence from the record. It does not appear on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard cartographic resource for locating historic features across Ireland, which means it was either already gone or already forgotten by the time those surveys were conducted through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No documentary trail exists. The only reason the site is known at all is that a local person, Greta Byrne, passed on the information. Without that single conversation, the place would be entirely invisible, not merely to the casual visitor but to formal record-keeping of any kind. There are no visible remains at ground level.
