Ringfort (Rath), Rahasane, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rahasane, Co. Galway

In a field at Rahasane in County Galway, there is something that barely registers as a structure at all.

A slight swelling in the pastureland, oval in outline, measuring roughly 33 metres north to south and just over 17 metres east to west, is all that survives of what may once have been a rath. A rath is a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval farmstead in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, within which a family would have lived and kept livestock. Thousands of them survive across the country in varying states of preservation; this one sits at the far end of that spectrum.

The bank that defines the circle here has a base width of nearly nine metres, yet its interior height is only about half a metre, and the top of the bank has been worn to less than a metre across. These are not the dimensions of a monument in good health. Centuries of ploughing, grazing, and general agricultural use have reduced whatever once stood here to the gentlest of traces, to the point where even its identification as a rath carries a degree of uncertainty. The qualifications in the archaeological record are worth noting: it is described as a "possible" rath in "very poorly preserved" condition. What this means in practice is that you are looking at a place where someone almost certainly lived during the early medieval period, perhaps between the sixth and twelfth centuries, but where the evidence has been so thoroughly softened by time that it can no longer speak with any confidence.

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Pete F
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