Ringfort, Pollboy, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
Beneath an ordinary Galway graveyard, a ringfort has effectively vanished, absorbed into the landscape so completely that nothing remains above ground to suggest it was ever there.
What the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded as a circular enclosure roughly forty metres in diameter at Pollboy is now occupied entirely by the modern graveyard that grew up over it, leaving the earlier structure with no visible surface trace whatsoever.
Ringforts, which are enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, were once among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside. They were built as circular areas defined by earthen banks and ditches, housing a farming family and their livestock. The association of this particular example with a graveyard is not entirely surprising. Sacred and domestic spaces have a long history of overlapping in Ireland, and early Christian burial grounds frequently established themselves on or near pre-existing enclosures, sometimes because the raised, bounded ground was already locally significant, sometimes simply because the physical form of a ringfort lent itself to reuse. Over time, as the graveyard expanded and was maintained, the earthworks of the earlier enclosure were levelled and lost. What the nineteenth-century mapmakers were still able to record as a distinct circular feature has since been entirely erased by subsequent use of the site.