Ringfort (Rath), Fiddaun, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Fiddaun, Co. Galway

There is nothing to see at this site in Fiddaun, and that, in its own quiet way, is exactly what makes it worth knowing about.

A rath, or ringfort, once occupied a roughly circular area of around twenty-five metres in diameter here, the kind of enclosed farmstead that thousands of early medieval Irish families built and lived within, typically consisting of an earthen bank and ditch surrounding a homestead. Today, the ground shows no visible trace of it at all.

The sole documentary evidence for the site's existence comes from the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which recorded it as a circular enclosure. Cartographers working on that survey noted field boundaries and earthworks with considerable care, and their record preserves the outline of features that the landscape itself has since swallowed entirely. In this case, a field boundary running roughly northeast to southwest passed immediately outside the southeastern sector of the enclosure, a detail that suggests the rath's outline was still legible enough in the 1830s to be distinguished from the surrounding agricultural geometry, even if only just. At some point between that survey and the present, whatever remained of the bank was levelled, most likely through sustained ploughing or land improvement, leaving the grassland smooth and unmarked.

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