Ringfort (Rath), Ballybaun, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballybaun, Co. Galway

There is nothing to see at Ballybaun, and that, in a way, is precisely the point.

Where a substantial ringfort once stood, a circular earthen enclosure roughly 56.7 metres in diameter defined by two banks and an intervening fosse, there is now only farmland. The fosse, a defensive ditch cut between the banks, and the banks themselves have all been levelled, most likely during field-clearance work carried out to bring the ground into agricultural use. Not a ridge, not a hollow, not a trace of earthwork survives above the surface.

The fort was catalogued by McCaffrey in 1952, who recorded it as a circular earthen fort of the type commonly called a rath, the everyday enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands of these enclosures once dotted the Irish landscape; many thousands have since been destroyed by agriculture, development, or gradual erosion. Ballybaun appears to be among the casualties. What keeps it from being entirely forgotten, however, is a set of aerial photographs taken in 2018. On those images, the full circular outline of the fort is legible as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features influence how vegetation grows above them, producing subtle differences in colour or height that are invisible from the ground but resolve into clear shapes from the air. The ghost of the ringfort, invisible to anyone walking the field, returned briefly to view from altitude. Roughly 40 metres to the south-east, a ring-barrow, a low circular burial mound of prehistoric date, also survives in the same area, suggesting the landscape around Ballybaun was significant to its inhabitants across a very long span of time.

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