Ringfort (Rath), Lissindragan, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lissindragan, Co. Galway

In a field of otherwise level pastureland in County Galway, a slight westward slope holds the remains of a double-banked earthen ringfort, the kind of ancient enclosure that once formed the basic unit of rural life across early medieval Ireland.

What makes this one quietly interesting is the asymmetry of its survival: the western arc of the structure remains legible in the landscape, while the eastern half has been worn almost entirely away.

When the archaeologist McCaffrey recorded the site in 1952, he classified it as a circular earthen fort roughly 22 metres in diameter, defined by two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, between them. A fosse is simply a defensive or boundary ditch dug to accompany an earthen bank, and here the intervening one measures about 1.9 metres wide. The inner bank still carries a modest external height of 1.3 metres, and the outer bank, though lower, remains visible from the south around through the west and on to the north. The eastern portion had already degraded considerably by the time of that survey, and the condition of the western half was described only as fair. Inside the enclosure, McCaffrey noted a depression in the ground, which he attributed not to any original feature of the fort but to later quarrying activity, suggesting the site was mined for material at some point after it fell out of use. A field boundary running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east sits just to the east of the monument, which may partly explain the erosion on that side, where generations of agricultural activity have gradually worked against the archaeology.

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Pete F
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