Promontory fort - coastal, An Baile Glas, Co. Mayo

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Promontory fort – coastal, An Baile Glas, Co. Mayo

At An Baile Glas on the Mayo coast, a narrow triangle of land juts out between a deep chasm to the east and a sheer cliff dropping to sea rocks on the west.

The ground is poor pasture, the view along the coast is long and open, and what sits here is a promontory fort, a type of enclosure in which builders used the natural drama of a headland to do much of their defensive work, then reinforced the landward side with banks and ditches. In this case, whoever constructed it was unusually thorough.

The fort is bivallate, meaning it has two concentric lines of earthen banks rather than one. The outer bank is the more substantial, standing a metre high and just over three metres wide, with an inner bank slightly lower and narrower behind it. Between them runs a flat-bottomed ditch that widens considerably from west to east, from roughly three metres across at one end to ten at the other. Beyond the outer bank, a further round-bottomed ditch lies almost flush with the surrounding ground level. A narrow causeway, only about 1.3 metres wide, threads through all of these layers near the eastern edge, forming what would have been the single controlled point of entry. The triangular interior, roughly 44 metres long and 16 metres wide, is level and largely empty except for one unexplained detail: a low earthen bank running diagonally across the garth, the open ground inside the enclosure. Its purpose is not recorded. The higher ground to the south, which overlooks the whole site, is the one geographical disadvantage the location could not overcome, whatever its builders thought about it.

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Pete F
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