Ringfort, Rath, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
Some of the most interesting archaeological sites in Ireland are the ones you cannot see.
On a gently sloping field in County Mayo, overlooking a stretch of low-lying wet pasture with Lough Caldragh roughly 200 metres to the north, there is a ringfort that has effectively ceased to exist above ground. No earthwork, no bank, no ditch; just pasture running uninterrupted across ground that was almost certainly once enclosed by a raised circular or oval embankment.
A rath, to use the Irish term, is an earthen ringfort, typically constructed during the early medieval period as a farmstead enclosure. They were built in their thousands across the island, and many survive as low, grassy banks. This particular example is a more ambiguous case. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map produced in 1838, suggesting it was either already diminished by that point or simply missed by the surveyors. By the 1919 edition of the same map, however, it is recorded as an oval hachured enclosure, the standard cartographic shorthand for a raised earthwork feature, measuring roughly 20 to 25 metres on its northwest to southeast axis and around 19 metres northeast to southwest. At some point between that 1919 survey and the present day, the feature was levelled entirely, leaving nothing visible at ground level.