Ringfort (Rath), Conagher, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Conagher, Co. Galway

Beneath the interior of this partially surviving ringfort at Conagher, local people knew of a cave.

Rather than excavate or investigate it, someone simply blocked it up, the practical concern being that livestock might fall in. That detail, pragmatic and unrecorded beyond oral memory, is now the most vivid thing about a site that has otherwise all but disappeared into the hillside.

The fort sits on a south-facing slope in undulating grassland, looking out over marshland to the south-east. When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in the nineteenth century, it showed a circular enclosure roughly 45 metres in diameter, the kind of earthen rath, a defended farmstead of the early medieval period typically enclosed by one or more banks and ditches, that was once a common feature of the Irish landscape. What survives today is a degraded earthen bank running from the west through the north to the east; the rest of the circuit has left no visible surface trace at all. The probable souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber often associated with ringforts and used for storage or refuge, remains blocked and unexamined below ground. Its exact nature, extent, and age are unknown.

Visitors approaching across the grassland would find little to orientate themselves without prior knowledge of the site. The surviving bank is partial and worn, and without the context of what the first-edition map recorded, the remnant earthworks could easily be read as nothing more than a natural rise in the ground. The marshland below to the south-east gives the location a certain atmosphere, but the fort itself asks the viewer to do a good deal of imaginative work.

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Pete F
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