Ringfort, Rafwee, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Rafwee, Co. Galway

On a west-facing hillside in north Galway, a roughly circular enclosure sits in a state of quiet collapse, its drystone wall long since fallen in on itself.

What survives is enough to read the shape of it: a cashel, roughly 20.8 metres across, with a narrow entrance gap of about 1.7 metres on the northern side, where the wall curves inward for six metres as if guiding whoever once passed through. A cashel is simply a stone-walled ringfort, the drystone equivalent of the earthen raths that dot the Irish countryside, and like those earthworks it would originally have enclosed a farmstead, probably in the early medieval period.

What makes Rafwee slightly more layered than a bare enclosure is the accumulation of structures within and around it. Inside the northwest sector of the cashel, pressed against the inner face of the enclosing wall, lie the grassed-over foundations of a small rectangular house, oriented roughly west-northwest to east-southeast and measuring just 5.8 metres long by 2.5 metres wide. That is a modest footprint, barely the size of a large room. Just outside the monument to the north, further remains survive of a two-roomed rectangular house. Whether these later structures represent continued use of the site after the cashel wall fell, or whether they were built in conscious relation to the older enclosure, is not recorded. The layering of periods at a single spot, each generation making use of what was already there, is a pattern that repeats across the Irish landscape, and Rafwee offers a quiet local example of it.

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Pete F
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