Ringfort (Rath), Glenmeen, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
By April 1984, when archaeologists visited this low rise in the undulating grassland of Glenmeen, east of the Loughrea to Kilreekill road, there was nothing left to see.
The ringfort that had once occupied this slight prominence had been levelled so thoroughly that no trace survived at ground level. And yet, from the air, its circular ghost remains perfectly legible, its outline preserved in the soil and crop patterns captured by aerial photography. It is the kind of site that exists almost entirely as an absence, known more by what has been removed than by anything that remains.
The fort was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1838, where it appears as a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 41 metres north to south and 39 metres east to west. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of an earthen bank and outer ditch enclosing a domestic space. This one was already partially levelled by the time the 1947 edition of the same map was produced, suggesting it was gradually lost to agricultural improvement across the intervening century. Associated with the enclosure is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that would originally have served the fort's inhabitants, perhaps for storage or refuge. A dwelling house built to the south-west of the site marks the continuing human use of this quiet corner of east Galway, though the earlier settlement it sits beside has long since disappeared into the fields around it.