Ringfort (Rath), Ballynaclogh, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballynaclogh, Co. Galway

What survives at Ballynaclogh is barely enough to read as a ringfort at all, and that near-invisibility is itself part of what makes it worth understanding.

Sitting in level grassland, the site consists of two adjoining enclosures, a form sometimes called a conjoined rath, and both are densely overgrown and very poorly preserved. Ringforts, broadly speaking, were enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and they survive across Ireland in their thousands, though rarely in conditions as reduced as this.

The northern enclosure is roughly D-shaped in plan, measuring approximately thirty metres east to west and twenty metres north to south, and its outline is defined by a scarp rather than a standing bank. A scarp in this context is simply a slope in the ground surface, all that remains when an original bank has been robbed, eroded, or ploughed down over centuries. A later field wall has been laid directly across it, running from the west through the north and round to the east, effectively cannibalising the older boundary for a more recent agricultural one. The southern enclosure is circular, around thirty metres in diameter, and retains a low bank along part of its western and north-western arc, with a scarp defining the rest. The two enclosures together suggest a site that was once more complex than a simple single-ring farmstead, though whether they were built simultaneously or represent different phases of occupation is no longer legible from what remains on the ground.

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