Ringfort (Rath), Fortyacres, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Fortyacres, Co. Galway

A low bank in a field of level grassland is rarely the kind of thing that stops you in your tracks, yet this subcircular earthwork in Fortyacres, County Galway, carries the outline of a settlement type that was once one of the most common features of the Irish countryside.

Tens of thousands of raths, as these ringforts are also known, were built across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most were the enclosed farmsteads of farming families, the bank and accompanying external ditch, or fosse, serving as a boundary against livestock straying out and wolves or rivals getting in.

This particular example measures approximately forty metres east to west and thirty-seven and a half metres north to south, making it a fairly typical size. Its defining features are a bank and an outer fosse, though the fosse has not survived along the south-western to northern arc, leaving that portion of the circuit incomplete. A gap on the south-eastern side, while thought to be of modern origin, may coincidentally echo where the original entrance once stood. Immediately abutting the monument to the south-south-west is a feature recorded as a cultivation ridge system, a type of remains associated with pre-modern tillage practices, suggesting the land around the rath has seen sustained agricultural use across many centuries. The overall condition is described as poor, which is not unusual; raths throughout Ireland have been lost to ploughing, development, and simple neglect over generations, and even a reduced example like this one preserves something of the spatial logic of early Irish rural life.

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