Ringfort (Rath), Rathkip, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
Beneath a modern house and its garden in Rathkip, County Mayo, the faint outline of an early medieval settlement has been quietly erased.
A rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, was a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically banked and ditched, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. This one, measuring approximately 25 metres in diameter, sits on a rise at the north-western end of a ridge running north-west to south-east, a position typical of such sites, which were often placed to command a view of the surrounding land.
The enclosure appears on both the 1837 and 1930 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, depicted as a roughly circular embanked form. By the time the 1930 survey was made, portions of the eastern and southern sections had already been absorbed into later field boundaries, a common fate for earthworks that remained useful as convenient ready-made walls long after their original purpose was forgotten. Today, nothing is visible at ground level. The site is partly overlain by a modern house and garden, and whatever physical trace once remained has been lost to development. A second rath survives approximately 70 metres to the north-east, a reminder that such enclosures were rarely isolated; early medieval farmsteads often clustered within sight of one another across the Irish countryside.