Lissatogher Forts, Skecoor, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Lissatogher Forts, Skecoor, Co. Galway

In a field of undulating Galway grassland, the outline of an ancient enclosure survives almost entirely by suggestion.

What was once a rath, a type of circular earthwork enclosure used in early medieval Ireland typically as a farmstead and its associated boundary, is now little more than a slight depression and a faint arc in the ground. Local memory held onto the name "fort", as it often does in rural Ireland long after the physical evidence has faded, and that word alone carries more information than the landscape now shows.

The site appears on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1945, marked as a circular enclosure with a diameter of roughly 40 metres. By that point it was already a cartographic record of something under pressure. Around 1950, the monument was levelled, most likely as part of agricultural improvement, and what remains today is a roughly subcircular area measuring approximately 43 metres north to south and 25.5 metres east to west, defined by a degraded scarp. A scarp, in this context, is simply a low slope or break in the ground surface, all that is left when a bank has been substantially reduced. Traces of a fosse, the ditch that would originally have encircled the enclosure, survive along the southern, western, and northern arcs. Modern field banks cut across the monument from two directions, adding to the sense of a landscape that has been repeatedly reorganised without much regard for what lay beneath. The site sits some 20 metres south of a second rath, which itself survives nearby, making this a small cluster of related monuments in what was once, evidently, a settled and managed piece of ground.

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