Ringfort (Rath), Cloonmorris, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cloonmorris, Co. Galway

In a field near Cloonmorris in County Galway, there is a site that exists more convincingly on paper than on the ground.

A rath, or ringfort, once occupied a gentle rise here, the kind of low, defensible prominence that early medieval farming communities in Ireland favoured when enclosing their homesteads with earthen banks. Ringforts were built in their thousands across the country between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, serving as enclosed farmsteads rather than military fortifications. This one, however, has been almost entirely erased.

The third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1921, recorded the site as a circular enclosure roughly twenty-five metres in diameter. That cartographic trace is now among the clearest evidence that anything was ever here. On the ground, only a low, irregular rise remains, and even that has been quarried away at its eastern and western edges, the kind of incremental loss that happens when a slight earthwork becomes a convenient source of fill or rubble over generations. To the north-west, a possible house site has been identified in close proximity, suggesting the rath may not have stood entirely alone in organising this small patch of landscape.

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Pete F
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