Listongower, Cahernagarry, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Listongower, Cahernagarry, Co. Galway

In the marshy grasslands of Cahernagarry, a low earthwork sits roughly thirty metres from a quiet stream, easy to overlook and easier still to misread as a natural feature of the landscape.

It is, in fact, a rath, the kind of enclosed farmstead that once formed the basic unit of rural life across early medieval Ireland. Thousands were built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, and while many have been ploughed out or built over, this one has survived in fair condition, its bank and external fosse, the ditch that ran around the outside to define and defend the enclosure, still broadly legible in the ground.

The enclosure is subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 43.5 metres from north-north-west to south-south-east and 32.5 metres from east-north-east to west-south-west. A wide gap of about 7.2 metres opens at the south, which may represent the original entrance, though later disturbance makes that difficult to say with confidence. A boreen, a narrow rural lane, has cut through the bank at both the north-west and the north, and a field wall has done further damage at the south and south-west. Two shallow hollows in the interior appear to be modern rather than archaeological in origin. The site is modest, neither exceptional in scale nor dramatically preserved, but it belongs to a category of monument that shaped the Irish countryside in ways that are still faintly visible if you know where to look.

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Pete F
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