Ringfort (Rath), Creggymulgreny, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Creggymulgreny, Co. Galway

What makes the ringfort at Creggymulgreny quietly interesting is not so much what survives as what the landscape around it reveals.

Within roughly 80 metres to the south-west lies another rath, meaning that two of these enclosures once sat in close proximity on the same patch of east Galway ground, a clustering that hints at sustained settlement activity rather than an isolated farmstead.

A rath is an early medieval enclosed settlement, typically circular or oval, defined by an earthen bank and ditch, and used as a farmstead by a family of some local standing. The example at Creggymulgreny is oval in plan, measuring approximately 26.5 metres east to west and 15.8 metres north to south, and is defined by a bank of earth and stone. By 1952, when Catriona McCaffrey catalogued it in her survey work, she described it as a very ruinous earthen fort. The interior has accumulated field-clearance rubble over the years, piled into the northern sector, and the vegetation has grown in thickly around it. What was once a functioning enclosure boundary has been gradually absorbed into the agricultural routine of the surrounding land, its stones redeployed and its outline softened by neglect.

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