Ringfort, Rabaun, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Rabaun, Co. Mayo

On a ridge in Rabaun, County Mayo, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits looking out over low-lying damp pasture to the north.

It is the kind of structure that rewards a second glance: what appears at first to be an ordinary field boundary resolves, on closer inspection, into something considerably older and more deliberate, a cashel whose builders engineered the very ground beneath their feet to make it work.

A cashel is a ringfort defined by a drystone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one is a well-preserved example of the type. The circular platform measures approximately 27.5 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west. Because the ridge on which it sits is uneven, the northern half of the interior was built up artificially to create a level floor, the earthen scarp of that raised platform then faced and topped with the enclosing wall. That wall still stands to around 3.5 metres on the north side and 3 metres on the south, with an interior height of roughly 1.4 metres at the south. The builders were working with the landscape rather than against it, using the natural elevation for visibility and defensibility while compensating for the slope with careful construction. Evidence of later modification to the wall is visible, and along the north-east to south-east arc it has been absorbed into use as a farm boundary, with a trackway running alongside it externally. The north-west section has fared less well, reduced to a low, sod-covered rise about 2 metres wide, its inner face long since swallowed by a later field wall. In the south-west quadrant, close to the enclosing wall, there is a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval ringforts, likely used for storage or concealment. A depression in the south-east quadrant hints at further subsurface features, though blackthorn scrub and animal burrows make it difficult to read. Brambles and blackthorn have colonised the western half of the interior, and heaps of field clearance stones have been piled against the exterior to the north-west and south, the accumulated tidying of generations of farmers who found the cashel wall a convenient place to dump what the fields threw up.

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Pete F
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