Ringfort (Rath), Cordarragh, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cordarragh, Co. Mayo

What looks at first glance like a gentle grassy mound rising from ordinary Co. Mayo pasture is, on closer inspection, something considerably older and stranger.

The slight dome, roughly 35 metres across, with a flattened centre of about 10 metres and a broad slope falling away to the edges, is what remains of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort: a circular earthwork enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and most often associated with farmsteads of some standing. This particular example has been partly levelled over time, its original banks worn down to a subtle swell in the ground, and the landscape around it has shifted to accommodate it rather than the other way around.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a circular embanked enclosure with a diameter of between 25 and 30 metres. By the 1919 edition, something had changed: the enclosure appeared roughly D-shaped, its eastern side now defined by a straight north-to-south field boundary rather than a curved earthwork. Later field walls have since pressed in on the monument from several directions, a laneway flanked by stone walls skirting the north-west to north-east of the perimeter, another wall clipping the eastern side on a north-west to south-east axis, and the remains of a further wall or scarp, still standing around a metre high in places, running from south to north-west around the southern edge. A modern house and garden sit immediately to the south-west. Perhaps most telling is a feature on the eastern perimeter: an irregular pit roughly five metres across and up to 0.8 metres deep, from which a trench extends westward for some 7.5 metres into the rising slope of the enclosure. This appears to be a quarry pit, suggesting that at some point the earthwork itself was treated as a convenient source of material, its fabric dug into and carried off for use elsewhere.

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