Ringfort (Rath), Rathglass, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rathglass, Co. Galway

When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn up in the nineteenth century, the surveyors who passed through Rathglass in County Galway marked this circular feature simply as a tree clump.

That label tells you something about how the landscape had been reshaped by the time anyone thought to record it. What they were almost certainly looking at was an ancient ringfort, the kind of roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, that once served as a farmstead or defended homestead for a family of some local standing. By the time the map-makers arrived, it had been absorbed into demesne land and dressed up, or at least tidied over, into something more ornamental.

What remains today is a roughly circular enclosure about twenty-five metres across, sitting in undulating grassland on what was formerly part of a private estate. A wide earthen bank defines the circuit from the south-south-west around to the west-south-west, and again from the north-west to the north-north-east. Where the bank has eroded or been removed, a scarp, a natural-looking slope cut into the ground, takes its place, reaching up to about one and a half metres at its highest. There is a gap roughly five metres wide on the western side, which may represent an original entrance. Beech trees, almost certainly planted during the demesne period, now grow along the perimeter, giving the enclosure the appearance it carried on that nineteenth-century map. A second enclosure has been recorded fifty metres to the south-south-west, which raises the possibility that the two features were related. Scholars working on the site have noted that it might be a ringfort that was later landscaped, or alternatively a deliberate tree-ring with no prehistoric origin at all. The question has not been settled.

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