Ringfort, Loughbown, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Loughbown, Co. Galway

A slight rise in the grassland at Loughbown, County Galway, is all that marks the presence of an early medieval enclosure that has been slowly losing its shape to the land around it for centuries.

The ringfort sits on a low hummock amid undulating ground, its circular form now obscured by vegetation and altered by later agricultural activity. What survives is a monument caught mid-disappearance.

Ringforts, known also as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised interior platform enclosed by one or more earthen banks with external ditches. This example at Loughbown measures roughly 26 metres in diameter and is defined by two banks with an intervening fosse, the term for the ditch dug between or around such banks. The best-preserved section runs from the south-east around through south to south-west, where the earthworks still hold something of their original profile. On the inner face of the inner bank, traces of stone revetment survive, meaning that at some point the bank was stabilised or faced with stone to prevent it slumping inward. A field boundary cuts across the monument at the north-east and south-east, and to the east of that boundary the fosse and outer bank have vanished entirely, absorbed into the farmed landscape. A second ringfort lies approximately 100 metres to the south-east, a reminder that these enclosures were rarely isolated features but part of a wider pattern of settled, managed land.

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