Lismurtagh, Loughbown, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ringforts

Lismurtagh, Loughbown, Co. Galway

Two ringforts sitting side by side on the same hillock is unusual enough to warrant attention.

At Lismurtagh in County Galway, a pair of conjoined raths occupy the summit of a low rise in undulating grassland, their earthworks worn and partially overwritten by later agricultural use, yet still legible to anyone who knows what to look for. A rath, to give the term its due, is an early medieval enclosure, typically circular, defined by an earthen bank and sometimes a surrounding ditch, and used as a farmstead or settlement. Finding two sharing a site is not unheard of, but it is uncommon enough to suggest the place held particular significance over a long period.

The north-western of the two enclosures is roughly subcircular, measuring approximately 22 metres north to south and 20.5 metres east to west. Its defining bank of earth and stone has been partially absorbed by a field wall running across its north-eastern and southern arc, which gives a sense of how thoroughly later farming activity has reworked the landscape here. Inside this enclosure there is a circular burial ground, the kind of small, often unmarked cemetery associated with early Christian or pre-Christian use of ringfort interiors. The south-eastern rath is the larger of the pair, kidney-shaped in plan and measuring around 29.5 metres on its longest axis. It retains an external fosse, a shallow ditch running outside the bank, which survives along the eastern and southern side. A causeway roughly two metres wide at the south-east marks the original entrance. Scattered boulders within the interior have no obvious arrangement. The site was noted by Egan in 1960 and later incorporated into the county-wide survey of North Galway.

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