Ringfort (Rath), Treanfohanaun, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Treanfohanaun, Co. Mayo

On a ridge in Treanfohanaun, County Mayo, the ground gives away a secret that later maps chose not to record.

A circular earthwork, a rath, once occupied this elevated spine of land, commanding long views down a broad, wet valley to the south-west. A rath is a ringfort, typically a raised earthen bank enclosing a roughly circular area, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or a marker of status. By the time Ordnance Survey cartographers returned after their first detailed survey of 1838, the structure had been levelled enough that it no longer merited a mark on the page.

The 1838 six-inch map is, in fact, the only cartographic record of the enclosure, showing a circular embanked form somewhere between 25 and 30 metres in diameter. What survived the levelling is a faint outline, a slightly raised platform measuring roughly 31 metres north-west to south-east and 27.7 metres north-east to south-west, still perceptible in the pasture if you know what you are looking at. Around most of the circuit the old scarp has been reduced to a barely noticeable undulation, but two fragments have held on. At the south-south-west, where the natural ridge slope lends reinforcement, the bank still rises to around 1.5 metres. At the north-west, a short section roughly 2.7 metres wide and a metre high survives intact, and a hawthorn tree has taken root in it, the kind of detail that sometimes marks former earthworks in the Irish countryside. Across the interior, remnants of a later field fence run on a north-east to south-west axis, cutting through the space the enclosure once defined, a sign of how thoroughly agricultural use reshaped the site over the intervening centuries.

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Pete F
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