Ringfort (Rath), Ballybrit, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballybrit, Co. Galway

Beneath the hooves and the bookmakers and the annual carnival of Galway Race Week, there is a ringfort.

It sits in rough pastureland within the grounds of Ballybrit racecourse, a circular earthwork 56 metres across, its enclosing bank unusually low and broad, measuring eight to ten metres wide but only about a metre in height. Most raths, the ringforts that once functioned as enclosed farmsteads across early medieval Ireland, present a more emphatic profile. This one is conspicuously modest, and that oddity is compounded by the fact that no trace of a fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies such an enclosure, was ever found.

The site came under archaeological scrutiny in 1971, when plans to widen the racecourse required the removal of the north-western quadrant of the bank and part of the interior. The work was carried out under archaeological supervision, and what emerged from that quadrant was quietly puzzling. An L-shaped earthen mound turned out to conceal a small double wall-faced drystone structure built from undressed limestone blocks, measuring roughly four metres by three and a half. Its function remained unclear, and no finds were recovered from it to help establish a date. Elsewhere in the interior, traces of a house were identified slightly west of centre, and east of that a Y-shaped earthen bank appeared to have served as an internal division within the enclosure. Further surface irregularities in the south-western quadrant hinted at other structural remains, and another subrectangular structure was identified five metres south of the main bank. The finds recovered across the site included post-medieval pottery, a bronze spear butt, and a hone stone used for sharpening blades, a modest but genuinely mixed assemblage spanning different periods. A separate enclosure lay just 25 metres to the west, suggesting the area was more densely occupied in the past than its current setting might imply.

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