Ringfort (Rath), Flaskagh More, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Flaskagh More, Co. Galway

On a hillbrow in the gently rolling grassland of Flaskagh More, there is a ringfort that has almost completely erased itself from the landscape.

No earthen banks survive in any obvious form; what remains is a faint change in vegetation, a subtle arc of different grass that traces the outline of what was once a substantial circular enclosure roughly 45 metres across. It is the kind of site that rewards someone who already knows where to look, and offers little to anyone who does not.

The site was recorded by a researcher named Neary in 1914, who described it as a circular, earthen rath. A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically dating from the first millennium AD and once extraordinarily common across Ireland. This particular example had already faded considerably by the time the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1930, where it appears as a circular enclosure rather than a fully legible monument. Neary's own work introduced a small complication into the record: on his location map, he appears to have confused this site with a neighbouring one nearby, a cartographic slip that muddied the picture for later researchers. Associated with the ringfort is a probable souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used in the early medieval period for storage or as a place of refuge, which suggests the site was once a functioning domestic settlement rather than a purely ceremonial or defensive one.

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