Ringfort (Rath), Behy More, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a low ridge in the undulating pasture of Behy More, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly above the point where the Busna and Black Rivers meet, some 160 metres to the south-east.
The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, one of the most common monument types in the country, yet each one carries its own particular character. This example is defined by a bank averaging around 5.3 metres wide and standing up to 1.25 metres high on its outer face to the east, with a more dramatic scarp of 1.9 metres to the west where the ground drops away. At the north-east, a low stone kerb is still visible along the inner face of the bank, a small detail that speaks to the original construction. The interior measures roughly 30 metres across, highest towards the west and north-west, sloping gently down to an entrance gap on the eastern side. That entrance, about 4.5 metres wide, is flanked on its northern edge by two large stones, still in place after what are likely more than a thousand years.
The rath would once have been encircled by a fosse, a defensive ditch cut outside the bank, though this has long since been filled in. A surviving arc of field fence running from the south-south-west to the north-north-west may trace the outer edge of that original ditch; the 1922 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a field fence running all the way around the site, most of which was removed during twentieth-century land reclamation. The gap between this surviving fence section and the bank varies between four and nearly six metres, a width consistent with an infilled fosse. Local tradition also holds that a souterrain lies beneath the interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with ringforts and thought to have served for storage or as a place of refuge. Nettles and thistles cluster thickly in the highest part of the interior to the north-west, a pattern often seen over disturbed or nutrient-rich ground, and sycamore and hawthorn now ring the bank, softening what was once a deliberately exposed defensive position overlooking the river confluence below.