Ringfort (Rath), Ballyglass, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballyglass, Co. Mayo

Most of what once stood at Ballyglass in County Mayo is now gone, but the ground has not quite forgotten it.

Somewhere beneath the pasture on a low rise, the ghost of an early medieval ringfort persists as a faint circular swell in the earth, roughly 29 metres across, its edges marked by a slight scarp that only becomes legible when the light falls at the right angle.

A rath, to use the Irish term, was a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch, known as a fosse, used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period. This one was levelled in the 1950s, a fate that befell a significant number of Irish ringforts during the mid-twentieth century, when agricultural improvement schemes and the demands of working land made ancient earthworks seem more like obstacles than assets. The bank was cleared, the fosse largely filled in, and a farm road was laid across the southern arc of the site, running roughly from south-southeast to south-southwest, cutting across the very features that once gave the enclosure its form. What survives are traces rather than structures: a faint rise, a suggestion of a scarp, and ephemeral remnants of the fosse and outer bank wherever the road has not already claimed them.

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