Westropp — Larger Cliff Forts of West Coast of Co. Mayo. 23 



The foi'ti is beautifully situated on a headland (240 feet high at tlie ring- 

 fort) and commanding a noble view of the lighthouse on Eagle Eock, and 

 southward to the huge mountains at Mulranny and Achill and to Iniskea 

 Island along a series of foaming bays and dark headlands and reefs. 



The builders, as in the vast majority of such forts, took advantage of a 

 fault in the cliff ; that at Dunnamo is a deep-marked cleft ending in coves 

 and conspicuous far away. Down the southern half of the fault a natural 

 gully, witlr a small stream, saved half their work, and a broken, ragged 

 slope outside it gave them a suggestion for the abattis. The illustration' 

 shows how well they raised the wall on the mainly natural scarp. The fine 

 layers of pink, grey, and dark brown gritstone, were more easily quarried, 

 as a deep fosse was dug to the north side of the intended entrance. 



Describing the features in order, we first reach a patch of velvet-like 

 sward, mainly sea-pink, in which some forty low stones, rarely exceeding a 

 foot high, more usually barely rising over the surface, mark where the tall 

 spikes rose a century ago. They begin at 30 feet from the outer entrance 

 and run in a patch, 18 feet wide and 15 feet out from the mound, for about 

 66 feet. The lines at the northern end radiate from a point in the rampart 

 where now no mark or feature is visible ; they all (as Wakeman noted) are in 

 four rows. Unlike the abattis at Dun Aengusa, Dubh Cathair, and Bally- 

 kin varga, in Aran and Clare,^ there seems to have been a space between these 

 spikes and the defences. This, if true, is a case of want of foresight, as 

 giving free ground for an enemy to reform and move freely in an attack. We 

 rather incline to think that the depression outside the mound, now nearly 

 filled up, was a fosse, with an outer mound levelled when it was filled, and 

 that the stones were set up to the latter earthwork. 



The next defence, and also confined to the north of the entrance,^ is a 

 well-marked mound of earth, in front of it a clearly marked, but shallow, 

 depression, 6 feet wide and about 6 inches deep, which some previous writers 

 have confused with the effective fosse. It begins at 1 feet from the end of 

 the entrance wall, running, like the other works, approximately towards the 

 E.N.E. ; then it can lae seen for over 80 feet as far as to the gully at the 

 " northern " end of tlie great fosse. It runs for ] 5 feet past the end of the 



' Plate vi., lig. 1. 



- See Proceedings E.I. Acad., vol. xxviii. (c), p. 21, and p. 180, and vol. vi., Ser. 3, p. 429 : 

 also Trans., vol. xxxi., Plates liii, Ivii. 



^ It is interesting to find that certain French promontory forts, of considerable complexity, are 

 absolutely lop-sided, the entrance being- along the edge of a crag, and the vails running across only 

 part of the ridge or neck (Bulletin, Prehist. Soc. de France, 1908, p. 73 ; Couzon, 1909, p. 302 ; 

 Cledar, Alpes Maritimes : Essai d'inventaire des Enceintes Prehistoriq-.ies (Castelars), du Var. 

 Dr. A. Guebhanl, 1906, from Compte rendu du premiei' Cnngres Prehist. de France, p. 44, Le 

 Barban. 



