Ringfort (Rath), Kilkerrin, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilkerrin, Co. Galway

Between five and fifteen hundred years of Irish farming history can pass by a driver on a rural Galway road without a second glance, and this ringfort near Kilkerrin is a fair example of exactly that.

It sits on a rise in undulating grassland, the kind of quietly elevated position that was no accident. A rath, as these enclosures are commonly known, is a roughly circular earthwork, typically constructed during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead for a single family or small community. The bank and internal space provided both a physical boundary and a statement of territorial presence.

This particular example measures about 51 metres in diameter, a substantial size that puts it in the middle range for such monuments. Its defining features are a bank of earth and stone running from the northern side through the east and around to the south-east, with a scarp, that is, a steep natural or cut slope, completing the circuit elsewhere. The combination of constructed bank and natural scarp is not unusual; builders of raths were practical people who used the local topography where it served them. What is more revealing of its later history is the field bank that cuts across the monument at both the north and the south, a sign that at some point, probably in the post-medieval period when land was being divided and enclosed in earnest, the old enclosure was simply parcelled into the surrounding field system without ceremony. The monument survives in fair condition despite this, the bank still legible in the landscape for those who know what they are looking at.

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