Ringfort (Rath), Tomboholla, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tomboholla, Co. Mayo

On a steep-sided gravel knoll in County Mayo, someone long ago built a ringfort that fits its hilltop so precisely the two seem made for each other.

A rath, as these earthwork enclosures are known, is typically defined by a raised bank or scarp encircling a central living area, and here the builders used almost every square metre of available summit, leaving only a narrow two-metre terrace of ground between the base of the enclosing scarp and the point where the knoll drops sharply away. The effect is less a fortress imposed on the landscape than a structure that seems to have grown from it.

The enclosure is an oval roughly 44 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and just under 29 metres across, with the scarp rising nearly two metres on its north-north-west side. The entrance lay at the ENE, where the ground forms a ramp-like slope down from the interior, though the lower section of this approach has been quarried away at some point in the past. That quarrying appears to have affected the south-east side of the outer terrace as well, cutting into what would once have been a more complete circuit of ground around the base of the enclosure. Inside, the western half of the interior is broadly level, and faint linear ridges running roughly north to south may be the ghostly remains of cultivation beds, suggesting that the enclosed space was farmed at some stage. A field fence on the western slope now merges with the rath scarp, obscuring that section of the outer terrace entirely. The knoll commands wide views in every direction, south over undulating grassland and north and north-east across flat stretches of bog. Local tradition held that there was once a stone table at the top of the fort, though what exactly this feature was remains unclear, and nothing of it survives today.

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