Ringfort (Rath), Carrownaglogh, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Carrownaglogh, Co. Mayo

In the rough pasture of Carrownaglogh, a ring of low stones sits quietly on a ridge, its original purpose largely absorbed by centuries of agricultural pragmatism.

What was once the enclosing bank of an early medieval ringfort, or rath, a circular earthwork enclosure typically used as a defended farmstead between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, has been folded into the working landscape so thoroughly that its prehistoric identity is easy to miss. Later field walls run along and over the old bank, and the external face has been reinforced in places with large, contiguous boulders, the kind of practical reuse that tells you this land has been continuously worked for a very long time.

The site is roughly circular, measuring twenty-six metres across on its northwest to southeast axis. The enclosing bank is modest, rising only half a metre on its outer face and barely a third of a metre on the inside, with a width of around two metres. A low internal rim of stones survives along part of the southern to northwestern arc, giving some sense of how the original circuit was formed before it was pressed into service as a field boundary. The interior slopes gently down toward the east and southeast, and the whole area, both the perimeter and the ground within, is now heavily colonised by blackthorn and hawthorn scrub, which simultaneously conceals and preserves the underlying structure. A farmyard lies immediately to the south, and the ridge position means the site still commands a decent outlook across the surrounding countryside, a quality that would have mattered to whoever chose to build here in the first place.

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Pete F
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