Ringfort (Rath), Pallas, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Pallas, Co. Galway

Between a hill and a gentle rise in the Galway grasslands at Pallas, a circular earthwork sits in a state of quiet disintegration, its outline still just legible in the landscape if you know where to look.

This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland, typically a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. What makes this one worth a second glance is precisely its ambiguity: only partially surviving, it occupies that awkward category of archaeological sites that are neither dramatic enough to draw crowds nor so eroded as to have vanished entirely.

The monument measures roughly 29 metres in diameter and is defined by a scarp, the sloped edge of what was once a more pronounced bank, and an external fosse, which is simply the ditch that would have encircled the enclosure. The fosse remains visible along the south-eastern to western arc, suggesting that erosion and agricultural activity have been kinder to that portion than to the rest. A field bank cuts across the monument from north-east to south-east, the kind of later intrusion that speaks to centuries of farming carried on without much regard for what lay underfoot. Sitting on a low hillock in undulating grassland, the rath would once have commanded a modest but useful view of the surrounding terrain, a practical consideration for whoever farmed and lived within it during the early medieval period.

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