Ringfort (Rath), Rathbal, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a narrow north-to-south ridge in County Mayo, a ring of hawthorn bushes marks out a circle of ground that has been enclosed, in one form or another, for well over a thousand years.
The enclosure is a rath, the earthen variety of ringfort that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as a defended farmstead for a single family and their livestock. This one sits at the top of the ridge with open views in every direction, the kind of position that made a great deal of sense before fences and county roads organised the landscape into something more legible.
The rath measures roughly thirty metres across in both directions, a circular raised area defined by an earthen bank that still reads clearly in the pasture. The bank is widest and tallest on the north side, where it reaches nearly five metres across and rises about 1.6 metres on the exterior face. Centuries of grazing cattle and sheep have worn numerous narrow breaks around its circuit, with the largest gap sitting at the south-southwest. A more significant section of the bank along the northeast to southeast arc has been levelled almost entirely, surviving now only as a faint scarp or undulation in the ground. It is this flattened stretch that is most likely to represent the original entrance, the point where people and animals would have passed in and out of the enclosure. The interior remains level, with a field fence running east to west just beyond the northern bank, and the whole perimeter softened by those hawthorn bushes, which are a common feature of old ringforts across Ireland and are traditionally regarded with a certain wariness when it comes to clearing or cutting them down. To the east, the ridge drops into a small valley where a stream follows the lower ground, providing the kind of reliable water source that would have made the site practical as well as defensible.