Ringfort (Rath), Loughbown, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Loughbown, Co. Galway

What survives at Loughbown is not much to look at, but its setting and its neighbours make it worth a second glance.

A poorly preserved ringfort sits in low-lying marshland about ten metres north of a stream, its subcircular outline measuring roughly 36 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west. A stone-faced bank defines the circuit, accompanied by an external fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have reinforced the enclosure's defensive or boundary function. A seven-metre gap in the southern arc may be the original entrance, though the rest of the monument has suffered considerably: field boundaries radiating outward from the northern and south-eastern sides of the bank have cut into and disturbed the fosse over the years.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they rely primarily on earthen or stone banks rather than timber palisades, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, used roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries as farmsteads for individual family groups. What makes the Loughbown example particularly interesting is not the ringfort itself but what lies nearby. Two fulachta fiadh sit within about twenty metres to the west-northwest and west-southwest respectively. A fulacht fiadh is a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and fire-cracked stone beside a trough or pit, where water was heated using hot stones. They are found in enormous numbers across Ireland and are generally dated to the Bronze Age, predating the ringfort by well over a thousand years. The pairing of a ringfort with fulachta fiadh in such close proximity suggests that this patch of Galway marshland attracted human activity across a very long stretch of time, even if the reasons why are now opaque.

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