Ringfort (Rath), Srah, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
A circular earthwork in County Mayo, straddling a gentle rise in an area of mixed grassland and bog, carries more layers of use than its battered drystone wall might suggest.
What appears at first to be a ruined ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland in the early medieval period, turns out to have been repurposed long after its original inhabitants were gone. Inside the roughly 35-metre enclosure, small upright stone slabs mark and outline graves, the interior having served at some point as a burial ground. This layering of function, a domestic enclosure that later became a place of the dead, is not unique in the Irish landscape, but it is always quietly arresting when you encounter it.
The rath itself is defined by a raised scarp, still topped in places by the remnants of a drystone wall that reaches 1.8 metres in height on the southern side, though for much of the circuit it has fallen into a dense band of collapsed rubble. There may be an original entrance at the south-east, where a low eroded gap about a metre wide breaks the perimeter, though this is uncertain. Beneath the interior, a souterrain survives. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used for storage or refuge. When the Ordnance Survey mapped this area in 1838, surveyors marked it simply as "Cave" on their six-inch map, a label that captures something of how such features were perceived by later generations who had lost the context for them. An old trackway, about a metre wide and flanked by field fences, clips the north-eastern edge of the site, suggesting the rath once sat close to a route that people used for centuries.
The perimeter today is thickly ringed with blackthorn, hawthorn, and elder, with further scrub encroaching on the interior and making close inspection difficult. A slumped heap of stone piled against the southern scarp is likely the result of field clearance rather than any original feature. Views from the slight rise remain open to the north and east, but field fences and trees now close off the outlook in other directions.