Ringfort, Cloonlara, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a narrow east-west ridge at Cloonlara in County Mayo, a ringfort sits with commanding views in every direction, though the monument itself has been so thoroughly absorbed into the surrounding agricultural landscape that distinguishing its ancient edges from the later field walls requires a careful eye.
What was once a neatly circular, bivallate enclosure, that is, one defended by two concentric banks, has been partly levelled, truncated, and overwritten by generations of farming. The result is something between an archaeological site and a puzzle, its original geometry legible only in fragments.
The enclosure measures roughly 25 metres east to west and 23 metres north to south. A sod-covered bank of earth and stone survives along the western to north-north-eastern arc, and a section of outer stone bank, about 2.2 metres wide, runs from the south-west to north-north-west, separated from the inner bank by a fosse, the defensive ditch characteristic of ringfort construction, though here it reads more as a flat terrace than a proper hollow. The south-eastern edge has been cut away by a straight field boundary that follows the natural line of the ridge slope, and the south-south-western arc has been removed entirely. Inside, a north-south field bank bisects the eastern half, tracing the line of an old farm track. Near the centre of the interior sit two low, sod-covered features, a roughly semicircular raised area about 3.7 metres across, and within it a smaller mound of earth and stones around 2 metres in diameter. These may simply be the accumulated debris of field clearance over many decades. What complicates any reading of this site is a question that remains unresolved: the banks contain enough stone to suggest this might originally have been a cashel, a ringfort built primarily of dry-stone walling, rather than a rath, the more common earthen type, whose banks were later reinforced with stone when the structure was folded into the field system. The two forms are sometimes difficult to tell apart even in well-preserved examples, and here, where so much has been altered, the distinction may never be settled.