Ringfort (Rath), Corrahoor, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Corrahoor, Co. Mayo

On the level top of a ridge in Corrahoor, County Mayo, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly in pasture, its original purpose folded into centuries of later agricultural use.

What makes it quietly strange is the way the past and the practical have been stitched together here: the ancient bank of a ringfort, or rath, has been incorporated wholesale into a system of field boundaries, its inner face reinforced with stone walling, much of which is now tumbled and dilapidated. Several field walls radiate outward from the rath on all sides, as if the whole landscape has organised itself around this older structure, and a disused trackway, flanked by field walls, extends away from it to the north-east.

A rath is an enclosed settlement of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and an external ditch, or fosse, and used as a farmstead or place of refuge. The Corrahoor example is a modest one, its interior estimated at roughly thirty metres in diameter. The earthen bank survives with a width of around four metres at its southern side, standing roughly 1.7 metres high on the exterior. An arc of fosse, between 2.5 and 3 metres wide, with its own outer bank, can still be traced from the south-east around to the south-west, though it has largely disappeared elsewhere. That outer bank has itself been modified, topped and faced with stone, and now does double duty as a field boundary. The fall of ground to the north-east and south-west suggests the elevated position was deliberate, offering the original occupants a degree of natural advantage.

The interior of the rath is level but largely obscured by brambles, and the perimeter is thickly ringed with hawthorn, hazel, and ash. This kind of dense scrub growth is common around old earthworks, partly because the raised ground and undisturbed soil provide ideal conditions, and partly because such features were often left unploughed out of a mixture of practicality and, historically, superstition surrounding fairy forts, as raths came to be known in Irish folklore. The vegetation here makes the full circuit difficult to read on the ground, but the arc of bank and fosse to the south remains clear enough to give a real sense of the original structure beneath all the later layering.

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Pete F
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