Ringfort, Eskermore, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a gentle east-facing slope in Eskermore, County Galway, the outlines of an early medieval farmstead are just barely legible in the landscape.
What survives is a subcircular rath, a type of enclosed settlement typically built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, in which a family or small community lived within a bank-and-ditch enclosure. This one measures approximately 36 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, dimensions that suggest a modest but not unusual example of a form once numbering in the tens of thousands across Ireland.
The site is poorly preserved. The defining feature is now little more than a low scarp, and along the eastern side even that has been obscured by a later field bank, laid down at some point when the land was reorganised for agricultural use. That kind of incremental erasure is common with raths; later farmers often found the raised ground of old enclosures convenient for setting boundary walls, inadvertently burying the earlier archaeology beneath more recent stonework. The inventory of North Galway compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling, published in 1999, records the site in this condition, which suggests it had already lost much of its original form well before anyone thought to document it formally.