Ringfort (Rath), Urraghry, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Urraghry, Co. Galway

In the undulating grassland of Urraghry in County Galway, there is a ringfort that no longer exists to the eye.

The ground holds no ridge, no hollow, no suggestion of the circular earthwork that once defined this spot. It is, in the most literal sense, a place whose interest lies entirely in its absence.

A rath, as ringforts of this earthen type are generally known, was typically a roughly circular enclosure bounded by one or more banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period as a farmstead or settlement. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands once distributed across the country. This particular example in Urraghry was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which places its documentation in the nineteenth century, as a circular enclosure approximately fifty metres in diameter. That cartographic record is now the most substantial evidence of its existence. No visible surface trace survives in the field today, meaning that centuries of agricultural activity, drainage, or simple erosion have levelled whatever banks and ditches originally marked it out from the surrounding land.

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