Ringfort (Rath), Corr, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
A silage pit and agricultural sheds now occupy the interior of what was once, in all likelihood, a ringfort on a gentle rise in the pastureland of Corr, County Galway.
There is nothing left to see at ground level, no earthwork, no ditch, no trace of any enclosing bank, yet the site earns its place in the archaeological record because of what older maps recorded before the land was put to modern use.
Ordnance Survey mapping carried out between 1912 and 1916 at the detailed 1:2500 scale shows a bivallate circular enclosure at this spot, meaning one defined by two concentric banks or ditches, roughly 40 metres in diameter. A ringfort, to give the general term some context, is a type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries, in which a family would have lived within a circular earthen rampart. The Corr example, if that is indeed what it was, sat within a mixed tree plantation that wrapped around it from the north-west to the south-east. By the time the six-inch Ordnance Survey map was revised in 1946, that plantation had already disappeared from the cartographic record. The earthworks themselves have since been levelled entirely, leaving the early twentieth-century survey as the primary evidence that anything was ever there.
