Ringfort, Ballydoogan, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Ballydoogan, Co. Galway

Most ringforts in Ireland were enclosed by a single bank and ditch, so the example at Ballydoogan in County Galway is already unusual on its own terms.

Here, four concentric banks once ringed a roughly circular interior some 39 metres across, separated by three intervening fosses, the ditches that would originally have made each earthen bank more formidable. Multivallate ringforts of this kind, those with multiple enclosing elements rather than one, are considerably rarer than their simpler counterparts and are sometimes associated with higher-status settlements of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when ringforts were the dominant form of rural enclosure across Ireland.

The site today is poorly preserved, and the landscape has quietly worked its way into the archaeology over the centuries. A field wall running east to west cuts across the northern section of the two outer banks, while another wall follows the line of the outermost bank from south to southwest, suggesting that at some point the earthworks were simply absorbed into the local field system and put to practical use as ready-made boundaries. The outermost fosse survives only to the northwest. A small mound extends from the outer bank at the south, and a trackway cuts through the enclosing elements at the southwest. A gap of about 3.2 metres at the northwest may represent the original entrance, though this cannot be confirmed with certainty. The whole structure sits in level grassland, which at least means the underlying shape of the earthworks, however eroded, remains legible to an attentive eye.

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