Ringfort, Luimnagh, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Luimnagh, Co. Galway

Sometimes the most telling detail about an archaeological site is not what survives but what was lost, and in the case of this ringfort at Luimnagh in County Galway, what was lost came with a precise date.

The site, known locally as the Caher, a name derived from the Irish word for a stone fort, was recorded in October 1983 as a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter, sitting on a north-east-facing slope of gently rising ground. By 1988, it had been levelled entirely.

When surveyors visited in 1983, the fort was still legible in the landscape. A bank of earth and stone curved around the enclosure from the north-east, through the south, and back to the north-west, while on the remaining arc a natural scarp served as the boundary. Inside, two dividing banks subdivided the interior space, a feature that would have separated different functional areas within what was once likely a farmstead of the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A corbelled stone structure, the type sometimes called a clochan or beehive cell, may also have been associated with the site. Roughly 250 metres to the south-east, a separate ringfort survives, suggesting this corner of North Galway once held a loose clustering of such enclosed settlements, each probably the home of a single farming family and their livestock.

The Luimnagh ringfort is a reminder of how much of the early medieval countryside existed intact into living memory, only to disappear through agricultural improvement. No earthwork remains to visit today.

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