Ringfort (Rath), Bunaneraghtish, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a north-south ridge in County Mayo, there is almost nothing left to see, and that near-absence is precisely what makes this site worth noting.
What was once a rath, a type of circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead or residence during the early medieval period, has been levelled so thoroughly that only the faintest suggestion of a raised circle, roughly 23 metres across, remains visible at ground level. The ridge itself still slopes gently eastward toward a broad stretch of grassland, and beyond that, about 400 metres off, lie the shores of Cloonagh Lough. The view likely looked much the same to whoever once lived within the enclosure's banks.
The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 as a sub-circular enclosure, one of the earliest systematic cartographic surveys of Ireland and a valuable record of features that were already ancient by that point. By the 1930 edition of the same mapping series, it is shown as an oval, hachured enclosure, the hachuring being a cartographic convention used to indicate raised earthworks, measuring approximately 35 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west. Sometime between that mid-twentieth century record and the present, the enclosure was levelled, its banks absorbed into the surrounding pasture. An east-west road or laneway that once ran immediately to the south of the site has also disappeared, leaving no trace of what would have been the everyday approach to the farmstead. Two layers of landscape, the enclosure and the road serving it, have both been erased within living memory.