Ringfort (Rath), Derry, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In a field of undulating grassland in Co. Galway, there is an archaeological site that no longer announces itself in any way.
No bank, no ditch, no rise in the ground. Whatever was once here has been levelled entirely, leaving only its coordinates and a pair of nineteenth-century map notations as evidence that it ever existed.
The site appears on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the earliest systematic cartographic surveys of Ireland, and again on a larger-scale plan surveyed between 1912 and 1916. Both show an oval enclosure measuring roughly 39 metres east-southeast to west-northwest and 32 metres northeast to southwest. That shape and scale are consistent with a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, typically a circular or oval earthen enclosure surrounded by one or more banks and ditches that served as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. The classification here remains tentative, recorded as "possibly a rath" rather than confirmed. Roughly 40 metres to the southeast lies another possible rath, suggesting this corner of Galway may once have had a small cluster of enclosed farmsteads in reasonably close proximity, a pattern not unusual in the Irish landscape but rarely so thoroughly erased.