Ringfort (Rath), Bouluskeagh, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Bouluskeagh, Co. Galway

There is a small rise in the grassland at Bouluskeagh, in County Galway, that holds nothing visible any longer.

No bank, no ditch, no trace of the circular enclosure that once occupied this slight elevation above the surrounding level fields. What is left exists only on paper, in the form of a map drawn in 1838 as part of the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland, which recorded a roughly circular feature approximately 45 metres in diameter. That map is now the only reliable evidence that anything was here at all.

The feature was a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts were the most common settlement form in early Ireland, constructed as earthen or stone enclosures within which a farming family would have lived and kept livestock. The one at Bouluskeagh sat on a gentle rise, a common choice for such sites, offering modest drainage and a degree of visibility across the surrounding ground. By the time the 1838 survey was carried out, it was already reduced enough to be recorded simply as an enclosure. At some point after that, a field boundary running roughly north-northeast to south-southwest cut across the western edge of the site, and whatever remained above ground eventually disappeared entirely. The land swallowed it.

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Pete F
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