Ringfort (Rath), Carrowroe, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Carrowroe, Co. Galway

A road runs straight through part of this ancient enclosure in Carrowroe, Co. Galway, cutting across what was once the northern arc of a roughly circular earthwork.

That collision of the modern and the ancient is, in a way, the most telling thing about the site. The rath, a type of ringfort consisting of a raised earthen bank enclosing a domestic or farmstead area, survives only in fragments: the bank can still be traced from the south-east, around the south, and up to the north-west, but beyond that the monument gives way to tarmac and verge.

A rath of this kind would originally have enclosed a defended farmstead, most likely dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1200 AD, when such enclosures were the dominant form of rural settlement across Ireland. This particular example measures approximately 28 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, making it a modest but not unusual size. Neary noted the site as far back as 1914, and even then the monument was in poor condition. Adding to the puzzle of the interior is a circular hollow roughly four and a half metres in diameter, which appears to be of modern rather than archaeological origin, its purpose unrecorded. The surrounding landscape is gently undulating grassland, the sort of quiet agricultural terrain where earthworks like this can persist for centuries, overlooked rather than excavated, surviving by inertia as much as by any deliberate protection.

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Pete F
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