Ringfort (Rath), Carrowbaun, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
At the south-western tip of a low ridge in County Mayo, a nearly perfect circle of earthwork sits in open pasture, ringed by hawthorn and hazel trees, its interior given over to grass and thistles.
What makes it quietly odd is not its age or its form, both of which are typical enough of the thousands of raths scattered across Ireland, but the way it has been quietly repurposed and eroded over the centuries while still retaining the essential logic of its original shape. A rath is an early medieval enclosed farmstead, usually dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, its earthen bank defining a protected domestic space for a family and their livestock. This one measures just over thirty-four metres across, and its outer slope has been cut almost vertically, a modification that strongly suggests the bank was later pressed into service as a field boundary, the ancient and the agricultural grafted onto each other without ceremony.
The earthwork has survived unevenly. Along the eastern and southern arc, the bank has been reduced to a scarp, though it still stands up to two metres on its outer face at the south. A sixteen-metre stretch on the eastern side has been levelled entirely, and the orientation of this gap, facing up the spine of the ridge, suggests it may mark the site of the original entrance. Outside the southern edge there is a slight depression about three metres wide, with a low rise beyond it; these features may be the remnants of a fosse and external bank, the ditch-and-mound arrangement that would have reinforced the enclosure. In the north-eastern quadrant, a large grassed-over pit, roughly twenty metres east to west and twelve metres north to south, cuts through the interior, probably a quarry at some point in the site's long afterlife. Perhaps most intriguing is a possible souterrain in the south-eastern quadrant. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, typically stone-lined, associated with early medieval settlements and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both. The ridge itself was evidently a focus of activity: another rath lies just 140 metres to the north-east, and the remains of a now-destroyed enclosure once stood 250 metres to the south-east on the slope below.