Ringfort (Rath), Tavraun, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
In a pasture field on a low rise in Tavraun, County Mayo, sits a ringfort that has quietly absorbed the landscape around it for well over a thousand years.
What makes this particular example worth pausing over is not just its survival, but its complexity. Where many Irish ringforts consist of a single enclosing bank and ditch, this one presents three concentric banks with intervening fosses, the kind of arrangement that archaeologists associate with higher-status settlements. A rath, to give it its Irish term, was typically the enclosed farmstead of an early medieval family, the banks and ditches serving as much to signal social standing as to provide any serious defence. Three circuits of earthworks rather than one suggested that whoever lived here occupied a position of some consequence.
The structure measures roughly 36.5 metres east to west and approximately 37 metres north to south. The innermost bank, which defines the central living platform, survives to an external height of around 0.8 metres and drops into a clearly defined fosse nearly four metres wide. A second fosse, somewhat narrower, can be traced across part of the southern and northeastern arc. The outermost bank, though partially removed along its southeastern to southwestern edge, has been quietly repurposed over the centuries, serving as a field boundary along one stretch and absorbed into a later boundary line along another, the kind of pragmatic recycling of ancient earthworks that is common across Irish farmland. A gap three metres wide in the inner bank at the southeast, with traces of stone facing still visible, almost certainly marks the original entrance. The route across the inner fosse at this point is flanked by low, partly stone-lined banks leading to a corresponding gap in the middle bank, giving a rare and legible sense of how people once moved in and out of such an enclosure. The outermost fosse and bank have been levelled here, perhaps long ago, perhaps more recently. The rath does not stand alone in this landscape: two further raths lie around 250 metres to the south-southwest, and an enclosure sits roughly 300 metres to the north, suggesting that this part of Mayo once supported a cluster of early medieval activity rather than a single isolated farmstead.
The interior today is heavily overgrown with brambles and long grass, and the perimeter is thickly ringed with hawthorn, blackthorn, sycamore, and more brambles. This dense vegetation is worth bearing in mind; the earthworks themselves are well preserved, but reading the detail of the banks and fosses requires walking the circuit carefully and looking for the breaks in the scrub where the ground profile becomes clearest.