Ringfort (Rath), Grangepark, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
Beneath a quiet field in Grangepark, Co. Galway, lies a structure that most people walking past would never suspect was there.
A slight rise in the ground is all that remains above the surface of what was once a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands of these ringforts survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but this one has fared worse than most.
The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, drawn in the nineteenth century when such features were still more legible in the landscape, recorded a subcircular enclosure measuring approximately 37 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and around 32 metres from northwest to southeast. At some point, a field boundary was driven through it on a roughly west-to-east line, bisecting the monument and hastening the erasure of whatever earthworks once defined it. That kind of damage, incremental and agricultural rather than deliberate, accounts for the disappearance of a great many ringforts across the country. The boundary did its work, and the enclosure quietly flattened into pasture over generations.