Ringfort (Rath), Largan, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Largan, Co. Galway

What makes this particular corner of north Galway quietly arresting is not the ringfort itself, which has seen better centuries, but the company it keeps.

Within a few metres of a breached and battered earthwork, a standing stone rises just seven metres to the east, a graveyard sits roughly thirty metres to the south, and beneath the ground inside the enclosure there is a souterrain, an artificially constructed underground passage or chamber of the kind early medieval communities used for storage or refuge. Four distinct features of different types and possibly different periods, all clustered on a single ridge above a stream in undulating grassland. That density of monument in such a small area is unusual enough to give pause.

The rath itself is a roughly circular enclosure about 36.2 metres in diameter, defined by a bank that has been breached in numerous places and is now poorly preserved. Raths, the earthen ringforts that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland, were typically farmstead enclosures built and occupied during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. The bank at Largan has suffered considerably over time, but the outline survives well enough to read on the ground. Killanin and Duignan noted the site in their 1967 survey of Galway's monuments, and its associated features, the souterrain, the standing stone, and the nearby graveyard, suggest a locality that attracted human activity across a long stretch of time, the standing stone potentially predating the rath by millennia, the graveyard possibly continuing in use long after the enclosure fell into disrepair.

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