Caltraghgarraun Fort, Barnpark, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Caltraghgarraun Fort, Barnpark, Co. Galway

What lingers most about this modest earthwork in north Galway is not the fort itself, which has been largely undone by centuries of agricultural clearance, but what was found close beside it.

Roughly 65 metres to the south-east, an early Iron Age hoard of Somerset type came to light, a category of metalwork associated with continental European connections and dated to a period when Ireland was beginning to absorb influences from the broader Celtic world. The hoard was documented by Brian Raftery in 1960, and its proximity to the ringfort, though perhaps coincidental, gives the site an extra layer of quiet significance.

The fort itself is a subcircular enclosure measuring about 44 metres on its north-west to south-east axis. A ringfort, in simple terms, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank or stone wall, used in early medieval Ireland primarily as a farmstead. Here, only a scarp, a low earthen slope or edge, survives to mark the perimeter from the east around through the south to the north-west; the rest of the enclosing bank has been removed by field clearance over the years. A modern field wall cuts across the monument at both the north-west and south-east, following the townland and barony boundaries, which says something about how thoroughly later administrative and agricultural divisions have been imposed on top of much older ones. Within what remains of the interior, a circular building ground has been recorded, the kind of foundation trace that suggests domestic occupation at some point in the past.

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