Ringfort, Lisnamoltaun, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
At Lisnamoltaun in County Galway, a ringfort sits in a state of considerable ruin, its outlines barely legible in the landscape.
What makes it quietly compelling is not what survives but what has been taken away. The monument has been extensively quarried, leaving a subcircular rath, the Irish term for an earthen ringfort typically used as a defended farmstead in the early medieval period, that now measures roughly 29 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west. A scarp, an intervening fosse (a defensive ditch), and an outer bank are still traceable across the southwestern to northeastern arc of the site, but much of the rest has been worked away, stone by stone.
This site does not stand alone in the immediate area. Some 180 metres to the east-southeast lies a second ringfort, and approximately 70 metres to the west-northwest sits a separate enclosure, suggesting that this particular patch of north Galway once hosted a modest cluster of related activity. Such groupings are not unusual in the Irish early medieval countryside, where ringforts often appear in loose association, possibly reflecting extended family landholdings or successive phases of settlement. At Lisnamoltaun, the relationship between these three monuments is now difficult to read on the ground given the degree of disturbance, but their proximity hints at a landscape that was once more deliberately organised than it appears today.