Ringfort (Rath), Park, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Park, Co. Galway

Most ringforts announce themselves readily enough, their enclosing banks still sharp against the skyline after a thousand or more years.

This one, sitting in undulating grassland in the townland of Park in County Galway, has grown quieter with time. The bank that once defined its perimeter has been worn down to little more than a suggestion, and the external fosse, the defensive ditch that would have encircled it, survives only along the arc running from the south-southwest to the northwest. The rest has been absorbed, gradually, into the ordinary surface of a field.

A rath of this kind would originally have served as a farmstead enclosure during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when thousands of such enclosed settlements were constructed across Ireland. The enclosing bank, typically built from earth thrown up from the surrounding ditch, defined a protected interior space for a family, their livestock, and their outbuildings. This particular example is subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 54 metres east to west and 50.5 metres north to south, placing it within a fairly typical size range for single-enclosure raths. What survives is denuded rather than demolished outright, the kind of slow erosion that comes from centuries of agricultural use rather than any deliberate clearance.

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