Ringfort (Rath), Ballynagalliagh, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballynagalliagh, Co. Sligo

On a gentle south-south-east-facing slope in the upland pasture of Ballynagalliagh, a circular earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, its original entrance still legible after more than a thousand years.

This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosed settlement in Ireland, typically a farmstead surrounded by one or more banks and ditches that defined both the domestic space and the social standing of whoever lived within. What makes this one worth pausing over is how much of its original anatomy survives.

The enclosure is roughly 25 metres across, ringed by a flat-topped bank of earth and stone nearly nine and a half metres wide and standing about 1.7 metres above the interior. Outside that runs a broad U-shaped fosse, the term for the defensive ditch cut to provide material for the bank above, measuring around five and a half metres wide. Beyond the fosse, a lower outer bank, about three metres wide and just under a metre tall, adds a further layer of definition to the boundary. On the north-west to north-east arc, this outer bank is absent, which may reflect later disturbance or an original variation in the construction. A relic field boundary, a remnant of some earlier or later agricultural arrangement, survives on the outer edge of the fosse along the north to north-west side. The entrance is particularly clear at the north-east, where a gap of around five and a half metres opens in the inner bank, a causeway crosses the fosse, and a corresponding break in the outer bank aligns to mark the original threshold into the enclosure.

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Pete F
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