Ringfort (Rath), Rathbaun, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
There is almost nothing left to see at Rathbaun, and yet the place refuses to disappear entirely.
Set in level pastureland in County Galway, this rath, a type of circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period, has been so thoroughly reduced by centuries of agricultural activity that no bank is now visible above the surface. What survives does so almost entirely from the air.
Ordnance Survey mapping from the early twentieth century, based on surveys carried out between 1912 and 1916, recorded a subcircular enclosure roughly 36 metres east to west and 32 metres north to south, defined by a raised bank and a fosse, the ditch that typically runs outside such a bank, with traces of a possible outer bank along the north-eastern to south-eastern arc. By the time McCaffrey examined the site in 1952, the damage was already severe. His assessment was blunt: the fort was "extremely damaged", with only a single surviving section of bank, roughly 48 metres long, 3.6 metres wide, and 1.2 metres high. The rest of the enclosure's outline could still be made out in the ploughed field, but the structure itself had effectively been broken apart. A field boundary curves around the monument from the west-southwest to the north, suggesting that later landuse arrangements at least partially respected the line of the original earthwork, even as farming wore it down. To the north of the bank, within what was described as a modern plantation, there were faint traces of a ditch that may once have been associated with the rath.
Today, aerial photography reveals the monument's ghostly footprint with surprising clarity. Where ground-level observation draws a blank, the crop and soil marks captured in digital aerial imagery trace out the old enclosure as if it had simply retreated below the surface rather than vanished. It is the kind of site that rewards looking at a screen more than walking across a field.