Ringfort (Rath), Weston, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
A field in County Galway still carries the name 'ring field', even though the earthwork that gave it that name has all but vanished.
The rath here, an oval enclosure roughly 45 metres by 40 metres, was once substantial enough to be mapped on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet in 1915, shown planted with trees and sitting within the former demesne of Weston House. A rath, or ringfort, is a circular or oval enclosure defined by an earthen bank and outer ditch, the standard form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland. Sometime in the early 1960s, however, someone levelled the bank and used the spoil to fill the fosse, the surrounding ditch, effectively erasing the monument's physical profile in a single agricultural operation.
What remained afterwards was stranger and, in its own way, more interesting. When archaeologists visited in November 1984, the rath had become legible only as a band of darker vegetation, roughly three metres wide, curving from south through west to north. The differential growth, likely caused by deeper or damper soil where the fosse had been filled, was tracing the monument's outline through the grass decades after the earthwork itself had gone. A possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage often associated with ringforts and used for storage or concealment, was also identified within the interior. On re-inspection in October 2001, the faint oval, measuring 43 metres east to west and 41 metres north to south, was still perceptible, and traces of the fosse and outer bank survived along the south-south-west to west arc. The site lies just 80 metres north-north-east of a second enclosure, suggesting a broader pattern of early settlement in this part of north Galway that the landscape still faintly preserves.