Ringfort, Atticorra, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In a field in north Galway, the outline of an early medieval homestead is barely holding its shape against the slow pressure of agricultural use.
The site at Atticorra is a rath, the Irish term for a circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a defended farmstead. This one measures roughly 34 metres in diameter, but you would be forgiven for not recognising it as anything deliberate at all. The bank that once defined its perimeter has degraded to little more than a low scarp across much of its circuit, surviving as a more legible earthwork only along the arc running from south-southwest through north to northeast.
What complicates the picture further is that the monument has been cut across by later field boundaries at its northeast and southeast edges, and a townland boundary runs directly over it to the south. These are the kinds of incremental intrusions, centuries of farming, fencing, and land division, that gradually erase a site without anyone making a deliberate decision to do so. At the centre of the interior sits a stony mound about 11 metres long, which is almost certainly the accumulated debris of field clearance rather than any original feature of the rath itself. Someone, at some point, simply piled the stones somewhere convenient, and the interior of a barely visible ancient enclosure was as good a place as any.