Lisnawoo

What a ringfort is

The name begins with lios, the Irish for the open space inside an earthen ringfort, so this is one of the earthen ring enclosures that farmsteads of the early Middle Ages were built inside.

The countryside around Tuam is dotted with ringforts, and there is nothing unusual in that: Ireland has more than 40,000 of them on record and probably had 50,000 once, about one in every two square kilometres, though ploughing and building have flattened many. They are small round enclosures, some of stone, most of banked earth with a ditch outside and once a wooden palisade on top, built from the Bronze Age through to about the year 1000 as the fenced yards of farmsteads. One or more houses stood inside.

The Irish names tell you what kind you are looking at. A ráth is the earthen bank, a lios the open space it encloses, so a place beginning Lis- or Rath- was an earthen fort; cathair, anglicised caher, is a stone-walled one; dún is a stronghold of some standing and need not be round at all. Many of the sites below survived because they were left alone as fairy forts, and many more were found on the first Ordnance Survey maps, from the air, or in the digging that comes before a new road.

Written from Wikipedia, "Ringfort" (CC BY-SA 4.0); the words are ours.

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