Promontory fort - coastal, Gleann Lára, Co. Mayo

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Promontory fort – coastal, Gleann Lára, Co. Mayo

On a north-west facing headland above the sheer cliffs of Gleann Lára, in County Mayo, there is a fort that the landscape seems determined to keep to itself.

Surrounded by wet mountainous bog and reachable only with considerable effort, the site occupies a sub-rectangular promontory measuring roughly 100 metres east to west and 90 metres north to south. What defended it was not a ditch, as was common elsewhere, but a drystone wall, now collapsed to a grassed-over ridge no more than 0.8 metres high, with at most four courses of stone still visible. A gentle curve in the wall's alignment and a gap near its southern end point to where an entrance once stood.

Within the fort, close to the northern edge of the headland, sits a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland. Its internal diameter measures 23 metres, and its walls share the same general proportions as the outer defences, averaging around 4 metres in width. Two small circular mounds of stone, each between 4 and 5 metres across and now heavily grassed over, are thought to be the remains of huts. One sits at the point where the cashel wall meets the outer defensive wall; the other lies within the western part of the cashel interior. The rest of the promontory is strewn with boulders, though the ground inside the cashel itself is comparatively clear. The site was documented as part of Markus Casey's 1999 survey of coastal promontory forts across Sligo, Mayo, Galway, and Clare, a project that brought sustained attention to a class of monument that tends to survive best precisely where it is hardest to reach.

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Pete F
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