Ringfort (Rath), Cloonlumney, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cloonlumney, Co. Mayo

A field fence cuts clean through the middle of this early medieval ringfort in County Mayo, bisecting it along a roughly north-south axis and dividing the enclosure into two very different halves.

To the east of the boundary, the interior is open grassland fringed with hawthorn and hazel; to the west, impenetrable blackthorn has swallowed the ground entirely, and a plantation of conifers presses to within a metre of the earthwork itself. The fence is a modern imposition, of course, but it has quietly reshaped how the monument exists in the landscape, splitting what was once a unified domestic enclosure into two privately managed fragments.

A rath, the Irish term for this kind of earthen ringfort, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by a bank and ditch, used throughout the early medieval period in Ireland as a farmstead for a single family or household. This particular example sits on a low ridge above the River Moy, with the ground falling away gradually to the north-west. The enclosure measures about 33 metres across and is defined by an earthen scarp with an external height of up to 1.5 metres on the north-east and south-west sides, dropping to around 0.8 metres at the south-east where the natural topography offers less reinforcement. A low, eroded gap in the scarp on the eastern side, flanked by large stones on its northern edge, may represent the original entrance. Inside, the ground is level, and towards the centre of the eastern half there is a low, D-shaped platform that may be the remnant of a circular timber or stone hut. More intriguing still, the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks a feature in the northern half of the enclosure, annotating it simply as "Cave"; this is understood to indicate a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that would have served for storage or refuge. A second rath lies about 240 metres to the north-north-west, on the opposite bank of the Moy, and the same nineteenth-century map records a fording and ferry point on the river between them, suggesting that this stretch of the Moy carried some significance as a crossing point well into the modern era.

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