Ringfort (Rath), Glentavraun, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Glentavraun, Co. Mayo

At Glentavraun in County Mayo, a ringfort sits in rough pasture at the top of a south-facing slope, overlooking a quiet spread of undulating land and bog.

Most of it is gone, levelled at some point after the nineteenth century, and yet the site refuses to disappear entirely. A slightly raised arc still curves through the southern half of the old enclosure, and the ground underfoot carries the memory of something deliberately made.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosed settlement of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as a farmstead by a single family or small community. The Glentavraun example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, where it appears as a circular embanked enclosure roughly thirty-five metres in diameter, but it had already vanished from later map editions by the time those revised surveys were made. What survives today is a scarp about a metre high defining a curved arc roughly twenty-two metres east to west, running from west-southwest to southeast before being cut short at the western end by a later field fence. The interior of the enclosure appears to have been deliberately raised on the southern side, most likely to create a level platform on what is naturally sloping ground. Just outside the scarp to the south, there is a faint depression approximately two metres wide that may represent the remains of a fosse, the outer ditch that would originally have reinforced the bank.

The rising ground to the north would have made this a naturally defensible and well-positioned site, with open views southward across the bog. It is the kind of place where the archaeology is subtle rather than dramatic, requiring a slow walk across the grass and some patience with slight changes in ground level to appreciate what is actually there.

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Pete F
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