Lissaperikeen, Dooros, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In the boggy pastureland of Dooros in east Galway, a circular earthen platform rises barely a metre above the surrounding ground, its centre lifted just slightly higher than its edges, like a shallow dish turned upside down.
It is easy to miss, and easier still to misread. What looks like a natural undulation in the landscape is in fact a rath, an enclosed ringfort of early medieval origin, reduced by time and weather to little more than a faint circular swell about thirty-five metres across.
Raths were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks enclosing a living area, and tens of thousands of them survive across the island in varying states of repair. This one has lost most of its defining features; the bank has eroded to a low platform, and the interior holds no visible trace of the structures that once stood within it. What gives the site its particular character is the presence of an associated children's burial ground. Known in Irish tradition as a cillín, this type of unconsecrated burial ground was used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Church doctrine from consecrated cemeteries. Cillíní are frequently found at prehistoric or early medieval sites, where the perceived antiquity of the ground may have lent it a kind of informal sanctity. The pairing of a ruined rath with a children's burial ground is not unusual in the Irish landscape, but it is quietly affecting, two layers of human use separated by centuries, each one now largely invisible to a passing eye.