Ringfort (Rath), Ballynacorra, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
What survives at Ballynacorra is less a monument than a faint argument in the landscape.
On a north-east-facing slope in County Galway, a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure that typically served as a farmstead during the early medieval period, has been worn down to the point where most of its defining features have disappeared. Where a raised bank and surrounding ditch once marked the perimeter of a small domestic world, the ground now offers little more than a scarp and the ghost of an outer fosse.
The enclosure was nearly circular, measuring approximately 37 metres east to west and 36.5 metres north to south. The external fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch dug around the outside of the bank, is best preserved along the southern arc. Moving westward and continuing through north to north-north-east, no surface trace of the enclosing elements remains at all. A field wall, built at some point after the rath fell out of use, cuts directly across the monument on that side, quietly erasing what the centuries had already begun to obscure. A possible entrance may have existed at the north-east, though the evidence is tentative.