Ringfort, Lisnamoltaun, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Lisnamoltaun, Co. Galway

Beneath the interior of this early medieval enclosure, local tradition insists, there is a cave.

No one has found it. No trace of an opening survives at the surface, and yet the story persists, attached to a low hillock in the grassland of Lisnamoltaun, west of a stream, in the quiet countryside of north Galway.

The structure itself is a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, with several thousand examples scattered across the country. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, surrounded by a circular or subcircular bank and sometimes a fosse, which is a ditch dug immediately outside the bank to reinforce the enclosure. This particular example measures approximately 29 metres across on its longer axis and 25.8 metres on the shorter, making it a modest but legible site. The bank of earth and stone survives along its southern, western, and northern arc; elsewhere the enclosure is defined by a natural or modified scarp. The fosse remains visible along the south-eastern to south-western stretch. At the north and south-south-east, the monument has been quarried away, which accounts for some of the gaps in what would once have been a continuous circuit. The tradition of a souterrain beneath the interior is plausible enough; souterrains were underground stone-lined passages or chambers, often built within ringforts and used for storage or refuge, and many remain undetected until chance exposure. Whether one exists here, and what it might contain, remains an open question.

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