Ringfort (Rath), Ballinderreen, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballinderreen, Co. Galway

In the farmland around Ballinderreen, a ringfort has effectively ceased to exist above ground, and yet it remains a catalogued monument, a place with coordinates and a classification and a measured history.

That tension, between the official record and the bare field, is what makes it quietly worth noting.

A rath, or earthen ringfort, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by a bank and ditch, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended settlement. The example at Ballinderreen appeared on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 as an almost circular enclosure roughly 37 metres in diameter. By the time the third edition of the same map was produced in 1933, the monument had already been partially levelled, with only the eastern half still indicated. A mid-century survey by McCaffrey, published in 1952, noted it as a circular earthen fort of which a bank roughly 40 metres long still survived. Sometime after that, the remainder disappeared entirely. No visible surface trace survives today.

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