Ringfort (Rath), Curry, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
What makes this particular rath in Curry, County Mayo, quietly unsettling is not its age but its afterlife.
Scattered across the interior, especially in the eastern half, are small stones embedded in the ground, none more than about twenty centimetres across and fifteen centimetres high. These are thought to be grave markers, the remnants of a children's burial ground. The practice of interring unbaptised infants in ringforts was widespread in Ireland, rooted in the belief that such liminal, already-consecrated places could receive those whom the Church would not. The fort's enclosing bank, which once defined this circle as something apart from the surrounding farmland, is now largely gone, but the ground still holds the memory of that function.
The rath sits on top of a drumlin, a low rounded hill shaped by glacial deposition, in the south-eastern corner of a pasture field. Its raised circular platform measures roughly 29 metres east to west and 28 metres north to south, defined now more by a worn scarp, between one and one and a half metres high, than by any surviving bank. Along the eastern edge, a low earthen rise buried beneath hazel roots may be what remains of the original bank, but elsewhere the structure has been reduced to this single eroded edge. Hazel trees ring it densely, stones protrude from the scarp face, and a concentration of large boulders clusters at the north-east. In the south-eastern quadrant, a shallow oval hollow, roughly eight metres by six and a half metres and about forty centimetres deep, is thought to mark a collapsed souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used for storage or refuge. A second rath lies approximately twenty metres to the south-south-east, making this a paired or clustered settlement of the kind found occasionally across the Irish landscape, where related enclosures suggest extended family groupings or successive occupation over time.
