Ringfort (Rath), Airgloony, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Airgloony, Co. Galway

There is a ringfort in Airgloony, County Galway, that exists now only on paper.

When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in the nineteenth century, it recorded a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter at this location, the kind of earthwork known as a rath, a raised ringfort of compacted earth that once served as a farmstead enclosure for an early medieval family or small community. Today, no visible surface trace of it survives.

Ringforts of this type were built in their thousands across Ireland, mostly between the sixth and tenth centuries, and they ranged from modest earthen banks to elaborate multi-vallate constructions with deep ditches and timber palisades. The Airgloony example appears to have been a relatively modest single-enclosure site, sitting some hundred metres south-west of a separate earthwork that still appears in the archaeological record. Whatever survived long enough to be captured by the Ordnance Survey has since been levelled entirely, most likely by agricultural improvement, ploughing, or the gradual erosion of the banks over the intervening centuries. The map record is now the only evidence it was ever there.

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