Ringfort (Rath), Lydacan, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lydacan, Co. Galway

A nineteenth-century burial vault sits inside a prehistoric ringfort in level pastureland at Lydacan, which is already an unusual enough combination, but what surrounds it makes the site stranger still.

Within roughly a hundred metres, you have a souterrain, a possible early medieval house site, a children's burial ground, and a bullaun stone, that last being a boulder with one or more cup-shaped depressions ground into its surface, likely used for ritual purposes over many centuries. The rath itself is subcircular, measuring approximately 29 metres east to west and 27.6 metres north to south across its interior, and it is defined by a massive flat-topped earthen bank that rises between three and 3.7 metres on its outer face. A fosse, the external defensive ditch that typically accompanies such banks, runs around the outside, still between 1.6 and 1.8 metres deep. The eastern entrance survives as a stone-lined causewayed gap just over two metres wide, which gives some sense of how carefully the original builders managed access to the enclosed space.

Raths, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure of early medieval date, were the most common form of farmstead in Ireland between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries. They were built by farming families to enclose a dwelling, protect livestock, and signal a degree of social standing. Most have been flattened by centuries of agriculture, which is what makes the Lydacan example so notable. Its bank, up to 9.5 metres wide at its broadest, has survived at a scale that suggests either exceptional original construction or fortunate neglect, perhaps both. The tree cover that now fills the interior has helped preserve the earthworks by discouraging ploughing, though it also obscures the features within. The souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of early medieval origin, typically used for storage or refuge, lies in the south-western quadrant alongside the possible house site. That the nineteenth-century burial vault was inserted into this same corner suggests the enclosure continued to carry significance in the landscape long after its original use had ended. The children's burial ground to the north, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, is a further layer of that long afterlife, such sites being used, often informally, for the burial of unbaptised infants into the modern era.

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