Ringfort (Rath), Rathmorrissy, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
A modern field boundary runs straight through this ancient enclosure near Rathmorrissy in County Galway, cutting across its northeastern and southwestern edges with the indifference of practical farming.
It is the kind of detail that quietly speaks to how Ireland's early medieval landscape has been absorbed, divided, and overwritten by centuries of agricultural life, leaving monuments like this one partly stranded between eras.
The site is a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure typically dating to the early medieval period, between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, and used as a farmstead or settlement by a single family or small community. This particular example sits on a gentle south-westerly facing slope in open pastureland, and its form is subcircular rather than a perfect ring, measuring approximately 56 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 52 metres northwest to southeast. What defines it structurally are two banks with an intervening fosse, the fosse being the ditch dug to throw up the earthen banks on either side. All of this is now heavily overgrown with bracken and bushes, which gives the monument a somewhat blurred outline from a distance. A causewayed entrance gap survives at the southeast, the causeway being an unexcavated section of the fosse left in place to allow passage across the ditch and through the enclosure boundary.