Ringfort (Rath), Carnaun, Co. Galway

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Ringfort (Rath), Carnaun, Co. Galway

In the townland of Carnaun in County Galway, there is a ringfort that nobody has formally visited, and whose recorded location is wrong.

That combination, an unverified site pinned to an incorrect spot on the map, puts it in an unusual category even among Ireland's thousands of raths. A rath is an early medieval earthwork enclosure, typically circular, built to define a farmstead and offer its occupants a degree of protection. This one, at least on paper, has a diameter of around 40 metres and curves in a rough semicircle from the north-west, sweeping through the east and down to the south-east, where the line of the old townland boundary cuts across it at both ends.

The sole surviving description comes from the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the landmark nineteenth-century survey that recorded Irish landscapes in meticulous detail at a moment when many ancient features were still legible in the fields. From that cartographic evidence alone, the enclosure was noted and catalogued. When archaeologists later compiled the county inventory for North Galway, published in 1999 under the names Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling, the site was included with the candid admission that it had not been visited on the ground and that its plotted position in the national monument record was inaccurate. The townland boundary slicing through it at two points suggests the earthwork was already old and established when the administrative landscape was being formalised around it, though whether anything survives above ground today remains, officially, unknown.

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Pete F
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