Ringfort (Rath), Cloonaghboy, Co. Mayo

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Ringfort (Rath), Cloonaghboy, Co. Mayo

What makes this rath in Cloonaghboy quietly odd is that only half of it was ever deliberately built.

Most ringforts, the circular or oval enclosed farmsteads that Irish farmers constructed throughout the early medieval period, are defined by a continuous bank and ditch running all the way around their perimeter. Here, the western arc is bounded by a proper earthen scarp, nearly two metres high and three and a half metres across its slope, but the eastern half relies almost entirely on a natural fall of ground. Whoever chose this knoll decided that the landscape itself was doing enough of the work on one side, and left it at that.

The site sits on the northern face of a small ridge, with the ground dropping away to the north into a wide flat stretch of pasture and bog, giving whoever lived within it a long, unobstructed view across low terrain. The enclosure is roughly oval, measuring about 35 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west. A shallow gully cuts through the scarp on the south-south-west side, possibly the original entrance passage. At the south-east, a short section of bank with stone facing on its outer slope survives, though it has been partially absorbed into a later field boundary running east to west. The interior is level and, at least on the surface, gives nothing away. Immediately to the south, an old quarry or sand-pit sits close to the enclosure edge, and some 20 metres down the slope to the north lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind often associated with early medieval settlement, used variously for storage, refuge, or concealment. Whether the souterrain was connected to the life of the rath above, or represents a separate feature of the same general period, is not recorded.

Dense overgrowth now covers the northern perimeter and the stretch where the field fence cuts across the south-east, obscuring whatever structural detail may survive there. The scarp on the western arc remains the most legible part of the monument, and the view northward across the bog, which the original occupants would have surveyed daily, is still much as it was.

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Pete F
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