Ringfort (Rath), Carheen, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Carheen, Co. Galway

In the rolling pastureland of Carheen, Co. Galway, a piece of Irish early medieval life is disappearing quietly into the ground.

A rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, was originally a roughly circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead, its raised bank offering both a degree of security and a clear boundary for livestock and family. This one measured around 40 metres in diameter, a modest but entirely typical size, and was still recognisable enough to be recorded as a circular enclosure on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1838. By the time the third edition was produced in 1933, it had already been partially levelled.

What survives today is a low bank running from the northern arc through the east and down to the south, roughly half the original circuit. A field wall, built at some point after the rath fell out of use, cuts across the interior from northwest to southwest, and to the west of that wall no surface trace of the original monument remains at all. It is the kind of slow erasure that happened to thousands of raths across Ireland as agricultural land was reorganised and boundaries redrawn across older, inconvenient earthworks. McCaffrey noted the site in 1952, cataloguing it as no. 89 in a survey of the area, by which point the damage was already well advanced.

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Pete F
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