Ringfort (Rath), Demesne, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Demesne, Co. Galway

Beneath a working farmyard in north County Galway, the outline of an early medieval settlement has quietly ceased to exist.

A rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a roughly circular earthen enclosure that would once have enclosed a farmstead and its outbuildings during the early medieval period, occupied a gentle rise in the surrounding pastureland here. By the time the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn up in 1930, it was still legible enough to be recorded as an oval enclosure measuring approximately 40 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and around 30 metres across. Sometime after that survey was made, farm buildings replaced it entirely, and no surface trace now remains.

Ringforts are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with estimates of around 50,000 having existed across the country, yet individual examples disappear from the landscape with little ceremony. This particular site is a case where the cartographic record preserves what the ground no longer can. A second earthwork was recorded approximately 30 metres to the south-east, suggesting that this corner of the Demesne townland may once have held a cluster of related activity, though that companion feature is documented only by its reference number and nothing further is known of its condition or character.

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