Ringfort (Rath), Gortknappagh, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Gortknappagh, Co. Galway

A low rise in the grassland at Gortknappagh, Co. Galway, marks the outline of an early medieval settlement that has been quietly dissolving back into the landscape for over a thousand years.

What survives is an almost circular earthen enclosure, a rath, measuring roughly 37 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west, sitting on a natural hummock amid gently rolling ground. A rath is a type of ringfort, typically a farmstead of the early medieval period enclosed by one or more earthen banks, and this example retains its defining bank along much of its circuit, now thickly colonised by hawthorn.

The outer fosse, a defensive ditch cut around the exterior of the bank, still holds its form on the western and northern arcs, running from west through north to northeast before it disappears beneath a later trackway on the eastern side. That north-south running track has effectively erased whatever the ditch once looked like along that stretch, a reminder of how routinely later land use has overwritten earlier archaeology. There is a substantial break in the bank at the south-southeast, likely a product of later disturbance or agricultural clearance, but a narrower gap on the north-northwest side, around 2.3 metres wide, may be original, possibly the site of the entrance through which early inhabitants once passed in and out of their enclosed farmstead.

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