Ringfort (Rath), Clooncah, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
A low oval earthwork in a pasture field in County Mayo would not, on first inspection, suggest much out of the ordinary.
But this particular enclosure in the townland of Clooncah carries a quietly unsettling detail: local tradition holds that it may once have served as a children's burial ground. That secondary use, if it is indeed what happened here, places it in a long and melancholy Irish custom of interring unbaptised children in liminal spaces, ancient earthworks among them, ground that was neither consecrated nor entirely profane.
The site is a rath, one of the thousands of roughly circular or oval earthen enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically as enclosed farmsteads. This one is broadly oval, measuring approximately 38 metres north to south and 35.6 metres east to west, and is defined for much of its circuit by a gravelly earthen scarp reaching about 1.45 metres in external height. It never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which means it went unrecorded in that foundational layer of Irish topographic documentation, a fact that itself says something about how thoroughly the landscape can absorb and conceal its own past. Parts of the enclosing bank have been levelled over time, though they remain faintly legible as surface undulations, and a section to the south-east has been folded into a later field boundary that follows the curve of the older enclosure as if in unconscious deference to it. Inside, a pronounced spine of raised ground runs through the centre on a roughly north-north-west to south-south-east axis, rising to about 1.6 metres at its western edge. This internal mound, which takes up most of the enclosed space, is crossed by a broken line of boulders, the remnant of a field division that once extended beyond the enclosure altogether. Near the northern end of this spine sits a small semi-circular or roughly L-shaped arrangement of stones, partially sod-covered and open to the north-north-east. To the south-east, in the narrow level strip between the spine and the outer scarp, a small circular feature about two metres across is defined by a low stony rim, its purpose unrecorded but its careful form difficult to dismiss as accidental.
The site sits in pasture on a gentle rise, with wetter ground to the north-east and north-west and a stream valley roughly 100 metres to the south-east. That stream also marks the townland boundary, one of those moments where a natural feature and an administrative line have been in agreement long enough that it is impossible to say which came first.