Ringfort, Lattoon, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Lattoon, Co. Galway

A low rise in the grassland at Lattoon holds the faint outline of a ringfort that most walkers would pass without a second glance.

What survives is an oval earthwork, measuring roughly 46 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west, its shape now readable less through upstanding banks than through a change in the vegetation. The external fosse, a defensive ditch that would originally have circled the enclosure, has settled into the earth over centuries, but from the east, around through the south and west, it still traces itself as a distinct band of different-coloured growth, the ground's quiet way of remembering what was once cut into it.

Ringforts, known in Irish as ráth when defined by earthen banks rather than stone, were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single farming family and their livestock within a circular or oval enclosure. This particular example belongs to a wider cluster in the area; a second ringfort lies approximately 200 metres to the east, suggesting the landscape around Lattoon was once considerably more populated than its present agricultural emptiness implies. The northern side of the monument has been further compromised by a field bank that cuts directly across it, a commonplace fate for earthworks that sat in the way of later land division and tillage. The result is a site that is, frankly, poorly preserved, yet the oval scarp and the fosse's vegetation trace are still legible to anyone who knows what to look for.

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Pete F
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