Ringfort (Rath), Moyower, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Moyower, Co. Galway

In a field in Moyower, Co. Galway, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly in the grassland, most of its defining features having gradually surrendered to centuries of agricultural use.

What remains is enough to read, if you know what to look for: a tree-lined bank tracing part of the perimeter, and a faint depression that marks the line of an outer fosse, the shallow defensive ditch that would once have ringed the whole enclosure.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, and they are generally understood to have served as the homesteads of farming families, their earthen banks and ditches providing a degree of security for people and livestock. The Moyower example measures approximately 41 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 37 metres northwest to southeast, making it a modest but reasonably typical example. A field bank, almost certainly a later agricultural boundary, cuts through the monument at the northeast and southeast, and it is this intrusion that accounts for much of the damage. To the east of that field bank, the enclosing elements have disappeared entirely from the surface. To the south and west, and again at the northeast, a band of different vegetation still traces the ghost of the fosse beneath the grass.

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Pete F
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