Ringfort (Rath), Banagher, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Banagher, Co. Galway

Most ringforts are reduced to a single earthen bank and a vague depression, their details long since softened by centuries of ploughing and weather.

This one in the grasslands of Banagher, County Galway, is something rather different. The circular rath measures 41 metres in diameter and retains two distinct banks separated by a fosse, the ditch that would once have made the enclosure genuinely difficult to breach. The inner bank is still faced with stone along its northern and eastern arc, and at the east-south-east a stone-lined entrance gap, nearly four metres wide, remains clearly legible in the ground. Beneath the surface, the site holds two souterrains, the stone-lined underground passages that early medieval inhabitants used for storage and, in times of trouble, concealment. One sits in the north-west quadrant of the interior; the other lies just outside the main enclosure, in the area where a secondary annexe once stood.

That annexe is one of the more intriguing puzzles here. A plan drawn by Costello in 1902 recorded an annexe-like feature adjoining the rath to the north-west, but by the time later researchers examined the site no clear surface trace of it remained. What does survive in that area is a series of radiating earthen banks running from the west around to the north, their precise relationship to the main enclosure uncertain. Costello returned to the site the following year and published his observations in 1903, and the site was noted again by Killanin and Duignan in their 1967 survey of Irish antiquities. The second souterrain, associated with the vanished annexe, is a reminder that the rath was likely a working farmstead of some complexity, not simply a defended enclosure but a managed landscape with outbuildings and underground infrastructure whose full extent is only partially recoverable now.

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Pete F
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