Ringfort (Rath), Knockatogher, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In a level field at Knockatogher in County Galway, the ground barely rises enough to catch your attention.
What survives here is a rath, a type of ringfort that would once have enclosed a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These enclosures were the most common form of rural settlement in early Ireland, and several thousand are recorded across the country, yet even by that standard this one has faded almost entirely into the landscape.
The rath is subcircular in plan, measuring forty metres on its north to south axis and thirty-six metres east to west. Its defining feature is an earthen bank, around three metres wide, which now stands only about forty centimetres above the interior ground level and eighty centimetres above the exterior. Accompanying the bank is an external fosse, which is a ditch dug to provide the material for the bank itself and to add a further degree of enclosure. That fosse now survives only as a slight hollow, choked with nettles, running from the southern to the western arc of the monument. The rest has been absorbed into the surrounding grassland over centuries of agricultural activity.