Ringfort (Rath), Kilgarriff, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilgarriff, Co. Mayo

What survives at Kilgarriff is, at most, half a ringfort.

The earthwork sits on a low east-west ridge in County Mayo, with open bog spreading away to the west, and what remains is a slightly raised D-shaped platform, roughly twenty metres north to south and ten metres east to west, where a curved bank and scarp mark the surviving arc of what was once a complete circular enclosure. The straight eastern edge is not an original feature; it is a field wall, the kind of boundary that replaced the structure it erased.

Ordnance Survey mapping tells the story in two frames. The 1838 six-inch map shows a circular enclosure somewhere between twenty and twenty-five metres in diameter, a typical rath, the enclosed farmstead type that dots the Irish countryside in the thousands, built during the early medieval period as a defended homestead for a family of some local standing. By the 1919 edition, the eastern half had gone, replaced by a straight field boundary, and a farmstead had appeared immediately to the east, the probable beneficiary of the cleared ground. The remaining scarp incorporates stones in places but is heavily eroded, and the interior, though flat, is scattered with loose stone. The site carries an additional layer of significance: it was used as a children's burial ground, a cillin, the informal, unconsecrated plots where unbaptised infants were quietly interred, often in ancient or marginal ground already set apart from ordinary use. No graves are now visible, and the whole area is densely overgrown.

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Pete F
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