Ringfort (Rath), Kilmore, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
Between the ancient and the merely old, this ringfort in Kilmore, County Mayo, has been quietly accumulating layers.
A rath, as such enclosures are known in Irish, is a roughly circular earthwork, typically Early Medieval in date, that once served as a farmstead and its enclosure. This one sits straddling a rise in undulating pasture, looking out over a stream valley to the north-east, with an esker, a long sinuous ridge of glacially deposited gravel, running along the far side of that valley. What makes it worth pausing over is not just the structure itself but the way several centuries of reuse have folded themselves into it, making it difficult, at first glance, to say where one period ends and another begins.
The rath is nearly perfectly circular, roughly 39.5 metres across, and its inner bank remains substantial, standing about 2.3 metres on the exterior face and showing traces of original stone facing in places. Three overlapping horizontal slabs still protrude from the outer slope of the bank at the north-north-east. The fosse, the defensive ditch that would once have run around the outside of the inner bank, has largely silted and settled into something closer to a terrace than a trench, particularly on the northern side. Beyond it, an outer bank survives in parts, though its stone facing has collapsed and, from the east-north-east to the south-west, it has been absorbed entirely into a later field wall. That later field wall also bisects the interior on a north-west to south-east axis, and another crosses the probable entrance at the south-east, where a gap about two metres wide in the inner bank hints at an original causeway across the fosse. On the western side of the interior, a small sunken rectangular structure, roughly 5.5 metres by 2 metres and enclosed by drystone walling, appears on both the 1838 and 1930 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as a house, most likely of 18th or 19th-century date, built directly against the inner face of the ancient bank. Beneath the north-west quadrant, according to local knowledge, lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind associated with Early Medieval settlement, used for storage or refuge.
The interior is grassy and open, but the perimeter is densely planted with ash, holly, hawthorn, and hazel, with brambles filling the gaps. That particular combination is not accidental; in Irish tradition, hawthorn especially is associated with fairy forts, and many a rath has survived agricultural clearance precisely because local people were reluctant to disturb it. The trees here give the site a closed, secretive quality that the low interior earthworks alone would not produce.