Ringfort (Rath), Curragh More, Co. Galway

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Ringfort (Rath), Curragh More, Co. Galway

In the low-lying grassland of Curragh More, a rath sits quietly incomplete, its southern arc of bank and ditch the only portion still legible in the landscape.

A rath is a ringfort, typically a roughly circular earthwork enclosure built during the early medieval period in Ireland, used as a farmstead or place of habitation. What survives here is half a monument, measuring roughly 27.7 metres east to west, and what is lost is almost as interesting as what remains.

The reason for the rath's peculiar condition has something to do with water. The Dooyertha River once curved around the northern side of the enclosure, running from west through north to northeast, effectively forming a natural boundary that separated the rath from a moated site immediately to its west. At some point the river shifted, and its present course now runs to the south of both monuments entirely. Whether that change in flow contributed to the erosion of the northern half is difficult to say with certainty, but the coincidence is suggestive. The southern half, defined by a bank and an external fosse, the fosse being a ditch dug outside the bank to reinforce the enclosure's defences, still describes a curve across the ground. A researcher named McCaffrey, writing in 1952, recorded an entrance gap on the eastern side, roughly 1.7 metres wide, though no trace of it is visible today. Within the southeastern quadrant of what was once the interior, there is a children's burial ground. These sites, sometimes called cillíní, were traditionally used to inter unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground; their presence within or beside older earthworks is not unusual in Ireland, as such liminal, anciently marked places were often chosen for this purpose.

The rath sits alongside a moated site to its west, and together the two monuments represent a layering of activity across different periods, each using the same low ground beside the same river, whose course has since moved on and left them both behind.

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