Ringfort, Cave, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
Most ringforts announce themselves with some confidence, their earthen banks still rising from the surrounding ground after more than a thousand years.
The one near Cave in County Galway is a quieter presence, its outline barely legible against the gently rolling farmland that surrounds it. What remains is a circular rath, roughly 32 metres in diameter, defined by a low bank and an external fosse, that is, a ditch dug around the outside of the enclosure to reinforce the boundary. The northern arc is where that fosse is clearest; elsewhere, centuries of agricultural activity have left the structure poorly preserved.
Raths of this kind were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single farming family and their livestock within a banked enclosure. They were built and occupied across a broad span of time, from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century, and they survive in their thousands across the Irish countryside, though rarely in perfect condition. The Cave example is modest even by the standards of the type, its dimensions placing it at the smaller end of the scale, and the cumulative effect of ploughing and field clearance over the generations has reduced what may once have been a fairly substantial earthwork to something considerably harder to read in the landscape.