Ringfort (Rath), Ballytrasna, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
What survives at Ballytrasna is less a monument than a memory of one.
On an east-facing slope in open grassland, a subcircular rath measuring roughly 36.5 metres north to south has been worn down to the point where only fragments of its original form are still legible in the landscape. A rath is a ringfort built from earthworks rather than stone, typically a raised circular enclosure defined by one or more banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or dwelling place during the early medieval period in Ireland. Here, two banks and an intervening fosse, the ditch running between them, once completed the circuit, but time and agricultural use have reduced what was already a modest structure.
The inner bank and its accompanying fosse can still be traced from the southern arc, continuing west and around to the north. The outer bank, by contrast, has almost entirely vanished, remaining visible only across a short stretch from the northwest to north-northwest. A field wall, built at some later and unrecorded point, cuts directly through the monument at its west-southwest and northwest edges, a common enough fate for earthworks that stood in the way of land division. Roughly 300 metres to the west lies a second ringfort, suggesting that this part of Ballytrasna was once a settled and organised early medieval landscape, with at least two separate enclosures occupying the same general ground.