Ringfort (Rath), Ballynamannin, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In the pastureland of Ballynamannin, a low circular bank describes a ring roughly 23 metres across, and a modern field wall cuts straight through it as though the earlier feature simply does not exist.
That indifference, accumulated across generations of farmers reshaping the land to their own purposes, is part of what makes this small ringfort so quietly telling.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined primarily by an earthen bank and ditch, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its associated buildings. This one sits on a gentle north-facing slope, its defining bank still legible but poorly preserved. When McCaffrey recorded the site in 1952, traces of an external fosse, a defensive ditch, were still visible along the southern arc; by the time more recent fieldwork was carried out, those traces had disappeared entirely from the surface. What does survive is a large depression in the south-eastern quadrant of the interior, roughly eleven metres east to west and three metres north to south, the origin of which is not recorded. It may reflect the collapse of a structure, the robbing of material over time, or something else altogether. The field wall that bisects the monument at the north-north-west and north-north-east makes any fuller reading of the plan difficult.