Lissanierin, Levallyroe, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
A quiet Mayo ridge holds something that modern suburbia has quietly grown around without quite absorbing.
At Levallyroe, the earthwork known as Lissanierin now sits at the junction of several fields, with the garden plots of modern houses pressing against it on three sides. Despite this encroachment, the structure retains a considerable physical presence, and local tradition holds that somewhere beneath its interior lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used variously for storage, refuge, or both.
Lissanierin is a bivallate rath, meaning it was enclosed not by a single bank-and-ditch circuit but by two. A rath is an early medieval farmstead, usually dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, defined by one or more earthen banks with an accompanying fosse, or ditch, dug just outside. Here, the circular raised interior measures about 33.5 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west. The inner bank has been largely worn down to a low scarp, standing no more than about 1.2 metres externally, but the outer earthen bank is considerably more intact, reaching an internal height of nearly two metres. That outer bank now doubles as a field boundary, and its unusually steep outer face is thought to be a relatively recent reshaping carried out for exactly that practical purpose. The fosse between the two banks remains broad and well-defined, running to between four and four and a half metres in width. The name Lissanierin appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1838 and 1916, suggesting the site was recognised and named long before any formal archaeological attention came its way.
The most likely entrance to the enclosure was somewhere on the east-southeast to southeast arc, where a possible causeway crossing the fosse and a gap in the outer bank can just about be detected. That gap and causeway are difficult to examine closely because of dense blackthorn scrub that rings the monument along with hawthorn, hazel, and brambles. The interior is equally overgrown, with long grass throughout and blackthorn pressing inward from the east. The vegetation gives the rath a closed, self-contained character, sitting on its ridge with gardens and pasture land parcelled around it, neither fully wild nor quite domesticated.