Ringfort (Rath), Sonnagh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
Only half a ringfort survives at Sonnagh, and that half-ness is precisely what makes it worth attention.
What was once a complete circular rath, the type of embanked enclosure built in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defensible homestead, now presents itself as a D-shape in the pasture on top of a ridge in County Mayo. The straight eastern edge is not an original feature; it is an absence, the line where the other half used to be.
The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837 already shows the monument in its truncated form, meaning the eastern portion had been removed before that survey was made. The ground to the east of a field fence that now marks the boundary is noticeably sunken, suggesting the earthworks there were quarried away rather than simply levelled. What remains on the western side is a raised D-shaped platform measuring roughly 39 metres north to south, defined along its curving edge by an earthen bank nearly four metres wide and standing about 1.4 metres above the external ground surface. Beyond the bank runs a shallow fosse, the ditch that would originally have encircled the entire structure. The bank itself is now ringed with hawthorn, and livestock grazing in the field has caused some erosion along its flanks. Perhaps the most quietly affecting detail is a piece of local tradition: the rath is said to contain a children's burial ground within its bounds. Such sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were used from the post-medieval period onwards to inter unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, and their presence within or beside older earthworks is not unusual across the west of Ireland. The association here gives the remaining half of the monument a layered significance that outlasted whatever brought the other half down.