Ringfort (Rath), Lismacteige, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lismacteige, Co. Galway

There is a field in Lismacteige, County Galway, where almost nothing remains, and that near-absence is precisely what makes it worth noting.

Somewhere beneath level grassland, a circular enclosure once stood roughly forty metres across, and today only the faintest rise in the ground hints that anything was ever there at all.

The site is recorded on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a clearly defined circular enclosure, which points to it having been a rath, the most common form of early medieval settlement in Ireland. A rath was typically a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, home to a farming family of middling status during the period roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. By the time the same landscape was mapped again in 1946, the enclosure had been partially levelled, and at some point after that, whatever earthworks remained were reduced to the subtle undulation that exists today. The cartographic record is now the primary evidence that anything was here at all, the maps doing the work that the ground no longer can.

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Pete F
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