Lisnabrone, Aggard Beg, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Lisnabrone, Aggard Beg, Co. Galway

On a ridge in Aggard Beg, surrounded by tillage fields, sits a circular earthwork that has quietly outlasted almost everything built around it.

It is a rath, the kind of enclosed farmstead that thousands of early medieval Irish families once lived within, and this particular example has survived in unusually good condition. Measuring 27.4 metres in diameter, it is defined by two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them, the whole arrangement forming a layered defensive boundary that would once have enclosed a domestic settlement of some kind.

Several gaps now cut through the inner bank, the result of centuries of agricultural activity and boundary-making, but one opening on the south-eastern side, around 1.8 metres wide, may be original, possibly the site's ancient entrance. The fosse and outer bank on the south-eastern side have also been disturbed, and along the southern and western stretches the outer bank has been absorbed into later field walls, the kind of gradual erasure that happens when farmers find a ready-made earthwork more useful as a boundary marker than as an archaeological curiosity. Recorded by McCaffrey in 1952, the site was noted even then as well-preserved, which speaks to the durability of its construction. Approximately seven metres to the north-east, a separate mound sits in quiet proximity, its relationship to the rath unexplained in the record but suggestive of a wider pattern of activity on this ridge.

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