Ringfort (Rath), Ellagh More, Co. Mayo

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Ringfort (Rath), Ellagh More, Co. Mayo

Two ringforts sitting within sight of each other on the same ridge is not something you encounter every day.

On a narrow NE-SW ridge at Ellagh More in County Mayo, this rath occupies the highest point of the rise, with a second enclosure visible just 200 metres away to the north-east. Whether the two were contemporary, or whether one succeeded the other across generations, is unknown, but their shared placement on the ridgeline suggests a deliberate claim on elevated ground and the long sightlines it offers.

A rath is a roughly circular enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, defined by an earthen or stone bank and used as a farmstead or defended homestead. This one is nearly perfectly circular, measuring just under 49 metres across in both directions, with a sod-covered stone bank still standing up to 1.5 metres on its exterior face. What makes it particularly readable as a landscape feature is the way later agricultural activity has grown over and out of it: field walls have been built on top of the original bank, and further walls radiate outward from it in four directions, so the old enclosure has been pressed into service as a kind of anchor for a much more recent field system. The gap currently used as an entrance, about 1.6 metres wide on the south-south-west side, may or may not be original. A curved scarp, faced with stone in places and reaching 1.5 metres in height, arcs around the south-west arc of the monument, pulling away from the bank by as much as five or six metres at its widest point. It may be a remnant of an outer enclosing bank, which would have made this a multivallate rath, a more elaborately defended type sometimes associated with higher-status occupants, though it could equally be a natural feature of the ridge shaped by more recent agricultural work.

The rath sits in working pasture, ringed by clumps of blackthorn and brambles that trace the perimeter with some persistence. The surrounding landscape takes in rocky outcrops, stretches of bog, Lough Brohly to the south-west, and the rising slopes of the Ox Mountains to the east, with a stream running about 100 metres to the north-west. It is the kind of position an early medieval farmer would have chosen with care, commanding the ground in every direction.

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