Ringfort, Beagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
What makes this particular site in Beagh, County Galway quietly compelling is precisely what is no longer there.
Roughly fifty metres east of a known ringfort, a second circular enclosure once existed, approximately thirty metres in diameter, and today nothing of it remains above ground. The land has swallowed it entirely.
Ringforts, sometimes called raths or cashels, were enclosed farmsteads built predominantly during the early medieval period in Ireland, typically dating from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Defined by an earthen bank or stone wall encircling a domestic space, they were the most common settlement form of their era, and thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The Beagh enclosure was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the great mid-nineteenth-century cartographic survey that captured the Irish landscape before much of it changed beyond recognition. At that point the circular form was still legible enough to be noted and mapped. At some point between that survey and the present day, all visible trace disappeared. Its pairing with the nearby ringfort to the west raises questions that the surviving record cannot answer; whether the two enclosures were contemporary, functionally linked, or simply neighbours across centuries of separate use is unknown. What remains is a coordinate, a diameter, and a ghost outline on an old map.