Ringfort, Treanlaur, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Treanlaur, Co. Mayo

What looks like a low, grassy mound on a hilltop in Treanlaur, Co. Mayo, is actually the ghost of an early medieval farmstead.

The domed rise, roughly 19 metres across, is all that physically remains of a ringfort, the circular earthen enclosures, defined by one or more banks and ditches, that served as enclosed farmsteads across Ireland from roughly the early centuries AD through to the Norman period. This one has been levelled, most likely through centuries of agricultural use, but the land itself still holds the outline of something older.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the site as a circular embanked enclosure of about 20 metres in diameter, with a rectangular vernacular building pressing up against it to the north-east and a second building a little further east. Neither the enclosure nor the two buildings appear on later map editions, suggesting they were already disappearing from the landscape by the mid-nineteenth century. On the ground today, a field wall running along the southern slope of the rise may actually preserve the original southern arc of the ringfort, its curve matching the expected line of the enclosure. A kink in a north-south field wall to the east of the rise may, in turn, mark where one of those two mapped buildings once stood, its presence recorded only in the slight awkwardness of a boundary that had to accommodate something already there. There is also a local tradition of a souterrain associated with the site, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that would typically have been used for storage or refuge, though no physical trace of it has been confirmed here.

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