Ballaghbristy Fort, Carrowmore, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ringforts

Ballaghbristy Fort, Carrowmore, Co. Galway

On the southern side of a small peninsula facing Mweenish Island in Connemara, there is almost nothing left to see.

A low, grassed-over bank of earth and stone stretches for about twenty-two metres along the western edge of what was once a substantial circular enclosure. The rest is gone, cleared away by farming activity over the generations. What survives is less a monument than the faint memory of one.

The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a roughly circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately fifty metres, the kind of earthen fort, or ringfort, that once served as a defended farmstead in early medieval Ireland. By the time McCaffrey catalogued it in 1952, even that outline had been largely undone, with tillage operations identified as the cause of most of the damage. The reference by Holt in 1912 suggests the site was noted by earlier observers too, though what they saw then was already a diminished thing. What the 1838 mapmakers recorded as a legible feature had, within a century, been reduced to a fragment.

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Pete F
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