Ringfort, Lattoon, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Lattoon, Co. Galway

At Lattoon in County Galway, two ringforts sit roughly 200 metres apart, which is itself a quiet curiosity.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, typically circular or oval earthworks that defined a family's living and working space. Finding a pair in such close proximity hints at a settled, organised landscape, though one of the two has fared considerably worse than the other over the centuries.

The more damaged of the pair is an oval rath, measuring approximately 34.5 metres on its north-south axis and 21.2 metres east to west. What survives of its enclosure is fragmentary: a bank still reads clearly at the north-east, but elsewhere the boundary has been reduced to a scarp, a low slope in the ground that is all that remains when an earthen bank has been worn or cut away over time. Quarrying has bitten into the monument from the north, removing whatever earthworks once stood there, and a field bank has been constructed around much of its perimeter, from the south-west around through north to south-east, further complicating the original shape. The result is a site that takes some effort to read in the landscape, its early medieval geometry surviving only in fragments beneath later agricultural and industrial intervention.

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