Ringfort (Rath), Drumnashinnagh, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Drumnashinnagh, Co. Mayo

In the pastureland of Drumnashinnagh, a nearly perfect circle sits quietly in the grass, its low earthen bank so overgrown that a person might walk past without registering what they were looking at.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was built and occupied across Ireland roughly between the early medieval period and around 1000 AD. Thousands survive across the country, yet each one carries its own particular geometry and its own relationship to the land around it.

This example measures roughly 51 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, making it a fairly typical domestic enclosure in terms of scale. The earthen bank, standing about 0.9 metres high, is accompanied by an external fosse, a shallow ditch, running from the north-east around to the south; the ditch here is relatively modest at 0.2 metres deep, though centuries of silting and vegetation will have reduced whatever original depth it once had. The entrance, at 3 metres wide, faces east, a common orientation in ringfort construction and one sometimes connected to practical or symbolic reasons relating to the morning sun. A road now skirts the site along its northern and western edges, meaning the ancient boundary and the modern one have become near neighbours. The site lies approximately 300 metres south-south-west of a second ringfort, suggesting this was once a settled and organised landscape rather than an isolated farmstead.

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Pete F
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