Ringfort (Rath), Killachunna, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Killachunna, Co. Galway

There is a small hillock in the grassland at Killachunna, Co. Galway, that carries the ghost of a settlement without showing a single stone of it.

What was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a roughly circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, has been entirely erased from the surface. Nothing visible now marks the spot where people once lived and worked.

The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a subcircular enclosure measuring approximately 26 metres east to west and 23 metres north to south. It sat at the southern end of a small rectangular field, and the field walls to the east and west actually cut across the ring itself, clipping it from the north-east to south-east on one side and from the north-west to south-west on the other. The boundaries of later agricultural land management, in other words, had already begun to press in on the site by the time it was first formally mapped. At some point after that, quarrying on the eastern face of the hillock, just to the north-east of the enclosure, further disturbed the area. The cumulative effect of these pressures is that no surface trace whatsoever survives today.

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Pete F
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