Ringfort (Rath), Kildrum, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a north-facing grassland slope in County Galway, there is a site that rewards patience and a trained eye rather than casual inspection.
What survives here is a partial arc of earthwork, the remnant of a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular or oval enclosure built from an earthen bank, typically thrown up during the early medieval period as a farmstead boundary and marker of status. Most of the bank has gone, but enough remains to trace its course from the east, around through the south, and on to the northwest, sketching out an oval that once measured roughly 50 metres north to south and about 40 metres east to west.
A shallow external fosse, the ditch dug to provide material for the bank, can still be detected faintly on the southern side. Such a feature would originally have reinforced the enclosure's boundary, and the fact that it survives at all, even partially, is due to the relatively undisturbed nature of this particular slope. Elsewhere around the oval, the ground shows nothing; centuries of agriculture, weathering, and gradual levelling have erased the rest. The site is described as poorly preserved, which is an honest assessment, but poorly preserved is not the same as insignificant. Tens of thousands of raths were built across Ireland, and each one represents a family or community that chose this particular ground, at a particular moment in the early medieval centuries, and shaped the earth to define their world.