Ringfort (Rath), Dervin, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
What makes this ringfort in Dervin, County Mayo, slightly puzzling is not the earthwork itself but what someone has done inside it.
Running immediately inside the main enclosing bank, and closely following its entire circuit, is a secondary ring of loose stone, partly grown over with sod. Heaped rather than built, it reads less like an ancient construction than a tidying exercise, and the working interpretation is that farmers cleared stones from nearby ground and pushed them against the inner face of the bank. It is an oddly tidy solution, and it gives the interior an almost doubled boundary that would not have been part of the original design.
The rath itself, a roughly oval earthen enclosure of the kind built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically as a defended farmstead, measures approximately 35.5 metres east to west and 40.4 metres north to south. Its bank is composed of earth and stone, with a gentle external scarp, and a two-metre gap on the eastern side may mark the original entrance. Stones protruding from the northern terminal hint at the possibility of an original stone facing, though this cannot be confirmed. Inside, the ground is uneven, with faint linear undulations running north to south that may be the traces of old cultivation ridges. Three loose stone heaps sit near the centre, each roughly six metres across and about half a metre high, their origin no clearer than the stone ring along the bank. To the north, just forty metres away, sits a mound, and roughly 160 metres to the northwest lies a separate enclosure, suggesting this corner of undulating Mayo pasture has seen a good deal of human activity across a long stretch of time, most of it now reduced to lumps and shadows in the ground.