Ringfort, Lissyegan, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
Between an ancient earthwork and a kitchen garden, the ringfort at Lissyegan occupies a quietly peculiar middle ground.
The interior of this early medieval enclosure, once the enclosed yard of a farmstead dating back perhaps fifteen hundred years, is now given over to growing vegetables. It is a mundane repurposing, but one that quietly continues a relationship with the land that the site's original inhabitants would have recognised.
A rath, as this type of monument is classified, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and, often, an external ditch. They were built in their thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period, serving as farmsteads for free farmers and their families. The example at Lissyegan sits on a south-east-facing slope in grassland and measures around 34 metres in diameter. An overgrown bank survives along the southern, western, and north-north-eastern arc, tracing enough of the original circuit to give a sense of the enclosure's former shape. The remainder has been lost to more recent activity: farm buildings have been constructed across part of the site, and a road now wraps around the monument from the south-east to the south, cutting off any surface trace that might otherwise have survived in those sectors.