Ringfort (Rath), Drumeyre, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
At Drumeyre in County Galway, a circular enclosure roughly 33 metres across once sat on a gentle rise above level grassland.
Today there is nothing on the ground to suggest it was ever there. No earthwork, no bank, no ditch; the field looks like any other field. Yet the site has been quietly documented for nearly two centuries, and its ghost, faint but legible, survives in aerial photography.
The enclosure first appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, marked as a roughly circular feature, and it was still recorded in the same form on the 1945 edition of the same map series. At some point between the nineteenth century and the present, the monument was erased at ground level. A field wall running northwest to southeast had already clipped the southern edge of the enclosure, suggesting that agricultural reorganisation was working against it even as cartographers were recording it. The site is described as possibly a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation; this one did not survive at all, at least not visibly. What remains is only the faint crop or soil mark legible in satellite and aerial imagery, the kind of trace that becomes visible when differences in soil depth or moisture cause vegetation to grow unevenly above a buried feature.
