Ringfort (Rath), Townplots, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Townplots, Co. Mayo

What survives here is easy to miss, and that is rather the point.

Buried under field clearance debris and thick overgrowth on a low natural rise in the Mayo countryside, this rath, a type of ringfort built from earthen banks that once served as a farmstead enclosure in early medieval Ireland, measures only around twenty metres across. Its defining bank has been worn down over centuries to little more than a scarp, roughly 1.3 metres high on the exterior and about 2.3 metres wide on the slope. By itself it might seem a modest remnant, the kind of feature that gets ploughed flat without much notice. What makes Townplots different is the company it keeps.

The rath sits within a dense cluster of prehistoric and early historic monuments that occupy a relatively small area of rolling pasture dotted with drumlin-like knolls. Within a radius of roughly 200 metres there are two further enclosures to the north-east, two possible barrows to the south-east, a second rath to the south-east, and a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial chamber typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, also to the north-east. The 1922 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded field boundaries to the east and south-east of the rath, but these were removed during subsequent land reclamation to create a single large open field. That act of agricultural tidying erased a layer of landscape history that had, until then, survived alongside the monuments themselves.

The enclosure is described as being in poor condition, obscured by heaps of clearance stone and engulfed in vegetation, which makes close examination difficult. The broader area does offer good views, particularly to the south-east and south-west, across the same undulating terrain that would have made this a legible and probably deliberate location for settlement and burial across several different periods.

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Pete F
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