Ringfort (Rath), Gortgarve, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On the south-western edge of Kiltimagh town in County Mayo, a ringfort sits almost entirely consumed by blackthorn scrub, its ancient earthworks now tangled into the same rough pasture as a ruined stone cottage.
The two features share the same field, the cottage remnants lying roughly twenty metres to the north-east, and together they give the impression of a landscape where different centuries have simply piled on top of one another and been left to grow over.
A rath, in the most general sense, is an early medieval enclosure, typically dating from somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries, defined by one or more earthen banks and used as a farmstead or defended dwelling. This particular example takes the form of an oval or oblong raised platform, measuring approximately forty-five metres on its north-north-west to south-south-east axis and around thirty metres across. The defining feature is an earthen scarp, a sloped retaining edge, which survives to a height of about 1.7 metres along the south-west to north-west arc. On the opposite side, from north-east to south-east, it has been worn down to between 0.8 and 1 metre, and at some point that degraded section was modified for practical reuse: cut back to the vertical and faced with drystone walling to serve as a field boundary. A semi-circular bite has been quarried out of the scarp at the north, removing a section of the original earthwork entirely. A property boundary on a north-east to south-west axis clips the north-west edge of the monument, meaning the rath has been gradually parcelled up and nibbled at from more than one direction. The interior is relatively level, though it slopes downward toward the west and south-west in the south-west quadrant. A small heap of stones sits at the foot of the blackthorn growth in the north-east quadrant, and the lowest point of the scarp, at the east or south-east, may mark where the original entrance once stood.
The blackthorn that now engulfs the site makes it genuinely difficult to examine at close quarters. Visitors who do pick their way in will find a monument that has been quietly repurposed, quarried, and absorbed into later agricultural boundaries over the centuries, leaving a structure that is easier to read from its surviving southern and western arc than from any other angle.