Ringfort (Rath), Carrownaglogh, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Carrownaglogh, Co. Mayo

A low ridge in County Mayo holds what may once have been a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, an enclosed homestead of the early medieval period typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches.

What survives at Carrownaglogh is barely legible in the landscape, yet its outline has not entirely disappeared. A slightly raised oval, roughly 23 metres north to south and 15 metres east to west, can still be traced in the pasture, and on the north-east arc a remnant bank and scarp persists, with an exterior height of around 0.7 metres and a slope width of about 2.4 metres. Elsewhere the circuit survives only as a faint undulation in the ground, and at the southern edge it is almost imperceptible.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1837 to 1838 recorded the site as a roughly circular enclosure, and the 1922 edition shows it still recognisable, though by then it had been absorbed into a field boundary along its south to west-northwest arc. At some point after that the earthwork was levelled, likely through agricultural use of the land. A property wall now bisects the site centrally on an east-northeast to west-southwest axis, cutting across whatever coherence the original circuit once had. The ground to the north drops away to wettish pasture bordered by a stream, while the fall to the south is more gradual, a topographic situation consistent with the kind of defensible, well-drained prominence that early medieval farmers tended to favour when siting an enclosed settlement.

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