Ringfort (Rath), Cuilmore, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cuilmore, Co. Mayo

A railway line runs about twenty metres from this ringfort in Cuilmore, County Mayo, which gives some sense of how quietly this early medieval enclosure has been absorbed into an ordinary working landscape.

The site sits on a northeast to southwest undulation in pasture, with the ground dropping away to the west toward a stream, and open views across bogland to the northeast. It is the kind of place that rewards a slow look rather than a quick glance.

The rath, as this type of ringfort is sometimes called in Irish usage, takes a roughly oval or D-shaped form, measuring approximately 34 metres along its longer axis. It is defined by a scarp, which is essentially an earthen escarpment or raised edge, and enclosed on the outside by a fosse, a shallow ditch cut into the ground. The scarp reaches its greatest height of around 2.9 metres at the west to northwest side, where it coincides with the natural slope of the land and appears almost linear rather than curved. Elsewhere the height drops to between 1.25 and 1.8 metres. The fosse, between 3 and 3.5 metres wide, survives most clearly at the north, where it cuts across the spine of the rise; elsewhere it has largely silted and flattened, visible now mainly as a slight depression picked out by nettles and weeds. One section of the scarp and part of the southeast interior have been quarried away at some point, leaving a grassed-over hollow. The level interior still carries faint traces of cultivation ridges running roughly north to south, suggesting the enclosed ground was worked at some stage after the monument had already begun to be treated as ordinary farmland. Hawthorn bushes grow along the scarp, and animal burrows have opened up in several places along its face.

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Pete F
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