Ringfort (Rath), Ahanduff More, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ahanduff More, Co. Galway

A low ridge in deciduous woodland in County Galway conceals a ringfort that has been quietly subsiding into the landscape for well over a thousand years.

The site is a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD as a defended farmstead for a single family or small community. They were constructed by raising a circular earthen bank, sometimes doubled or tripled, with a ditch dug just outside to deepen the defensive effect. At Ahanduff More, two such banks survive, tree-lined now and softened by root and weather, with the intervening fosse, the ditch between them, still legible underfoot.

The enclosure measures around 34 metres in diameter, a fairly typical scale for a bivallate rath of this kind. It sits in what is described as fair condition, which in the context of earthwork archaeology means the basic form is still readable even if the sharper geometry of the original construction has long since blurred. The trouble arrives at the north-east and south-south-east, where a field boundary cuts directly through the monument. That kind of agricultural intrusion is common across Ireland, particularly where townland boundaries were drawn or redrawn in the post-medieval period without much regard for what lay beneath the soil. East of that boundary line, the banks and fosse disappear entirely, leaving roughly half the circuit visible and the other half absorbed into the surrounding farmland.

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