Ringfort (Rath), Mullaroe, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Mullaroe, Co. Sligo

In the pasture east of Mullaroe townland in County Sligo, a ringfort has been quietly erased.

Not dramatically demolished, but boxed in and overgrown: post-medieval field boundaries were laid out so tightly around the site that they effectively quarantined it on four sides, and the enclosing bank of the rath, a roughly oval earthwork once measuring around 32 metres across its longer axis, has been largely or entirely levelled. What remains is a rectangular pocket of blackthorn, elder, and brambles so dense that much of the interior is now physically inaccessible.

A rath is a ringfort defined by an earthen bank rather than stone, and was typically a farmstead enclosure of the early medieval period. The Mullaroe example does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, which may suggest it had already suffered considerable damage by that point, or simply that it was too degraded to record with confidence. By 1913, however, it had been mapped in hachured outline, showing the oval enclosure and the field boundaries already pressing against it. Those same boundaries remain today, and the scrub they have helped foster is thickest precisely where the rath once stood. One detail survives the general obliteration: towards the western end of the interior, a low subcircular rise in the ground, roughly six to eight metres across and no more than 0.3 to 0.4 metres high, marks the position of a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind frequently associated with early medieval settlement sites, used variously for storage, refuge, or both.

The site sits on gently elevated pasture with the ground falling away to the north-east, opening out over a broad sweep of coastal grassland. Ben Bulben and Knocknarae sit on the far horizon in that direction, Skreen Hill rises 400 metres to the west, and a stream marking the southern townland boundary runs 300 metres to the south. The view, in other words, is expansive; the monument itself has almost entirely disappeared into the landscape it once commanded.

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Pete F
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