Ringfort, Clonbrock Demesne, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Clonbrock Demesne, Co. Galway

In the level grassland of the former Clonbrock estate in County Galway, a low series of earthworks traces the outline of a settlement that predates the estate around it by well over a thousand years.

It is not immediately obvious to an untrained eye; the banks are worn, the ditches partly silted, and what was once a substantial enclosure now reads more as a gentle corrugation in the ground than anything dramatically ancient.

The structure is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the kind of roughly circular enclosure built throughout Ireland from the early medieval period onward, most commonly as a defended farmstead for a family of some local standing. This particular example is subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 42 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and around 35 metres across from northwest to southeast. What made it more elaborate than the average example was its triple-bank arrangement, with two intervening fosses, or ditches, separating the earthen rings. Multiple banks generally indicate higher status, the assumption being that the additional labour required to construct them reflected the wealth or authority of whoever lived within. Of the three banks, however, only the middle one and its associated fosse survive with any clarity, and only on the southern side; elsewhere that middle element has been reduced to something closer to a berm, a narrow flat shelf between the surviving banks, suggesting centuries of erosion and agricultural disturbance. The outer features have fared somewhat better, but the whole monument is classified as poorly preserved.

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Pete F
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