Ringfort (Rath), Flaskagh More, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Flaskagh More, Co. Galway

On a north-east-facing hillside in Flaskagh More, a circular earthwork sits in the grassland in a state of slow erasure.

What was once a rath, a type of ringfort defined by a raised bank and internal living space used by early medieval farming families in Ireland, has been reduced to fragments. To the south, a low bank still traces part of the original circuit. From the north-west around through the north to the north-east, a scarp, a natural-looking slope that is in fact the degraded remnant of an earthen enclosure, carries the outline a little further. At the east and west, nothing at all remains above ground; field walls built in later centuries cut directly across those sections, removing or burying whatever survived.

The site measures roughly 30 metres in diameter, which falls within the typical range for a single-family rath of the early medieval period, when such enclosures served as the enclosed farmsteads of free landowners across the Irish countryside. It was noted as long ago as 1914, when a reference appeared in Neary's survey of the area. What makes it quietly interesting is not what it contains, which is now largely invisible, but what it illustrates about the long attrition that field boundaries and generations of agricultural use inflict on earthworks of this kind. A second ringfort lies approximately 220 metres to the south-west, suggesting that this particular hillside in north Galway once supported at least two such enclosed settlements in relatively close proximity, a pattern not unusual in areas of productive early medieval farmland.

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