Ringfort (Rath), Ballyglass, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In a flat stretch of Galway pastureland, the faint curve of an ancient enclosure sits beneath a later field wall, its original character still unresolved after decades of scrutiny.
When the archaeologist McCaffrey catalogued the site in 1952, he could only venture a tentative classification, a stone fort with a question mark, because the enclosing element was so thoroughly buried under accumulated earth and rubble that its true construction could not be confirmed.
What survives today is a circular rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure typically used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, measuring around 41 metres in diameter. Its boundary is now nothing more than a low, grass-covered bank, and even that modest profile has been interrupted by a field wall built across it at some later point. The site sits in the ambiguous category of places that are archaeologically significant but visually underwhelming, their meaning buried as thoroughly as their fabric. What gives the site an additional and quieter layer of interest is the presence of an associated children's burial ground. Known in Irish tradition as a cillín, such burial grounds were used for unbaptised infants and others who, by the conventions of the institutional Church, could not be interred in consecrated ground. They were typically sited near old ecclesiastical remains, ancient earthworks, or the margins of settled land, and the connection between this rath and such a burial ground places it within a long pattern of sacred use and community memory that outlasted any understanding of the original structure's purpose.