Ringfort (Rath), Ardnagall, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
Sitting on the crest of a low hillock in the rolling grassland of north Galway, this subcircular earthwork is easy to overlook and easier still to misread.
What appears at first glance to be a slight rise in a field is in fact the remnant of a rath, an early medieval enclosure typically built to define a farmstead and signal its owner's status within the surrounding landscape. The earthwork measures roughly 26.5 metres east to west and 25.2 metres north to south, making it a fairly modest example of its type.
The rath is defined by a bank with an external fosse, which is the ditch dug to throw up the bank material in the first place. That fosse survives in reasonable condition along the northern, eastern, and south-south-western arc of the monument, though it has been interrupted and obscured elsewhere. Several gaps punctuate the bank, and these appear to be of modern rather than ancient origin, likely the result of agricultural clearance or the gradual accommodation of farm traffic over generations. A field boundary cuts directly across the monument at two points, at the north-north-east and south-south-west, which means the rath has been partly absorbed into the working geometry of the fields around it rather than preserved apart from them. That kind of incremental encroachment is common across Ireland, where thousands of similar enclosures have survived not through deliberate protection but simply because the earthworks were awkward to remove entirely.
