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Mountain Fort

Fairy fort / earthen ringfort

What is recorded here

Mountain Fort is a poorly preserved oval rath on a Galway grassland rise, its earth bank now riddled with cattle gaps. The site dates to the ancient Irish landscape, where such ringforts served as defensive homesteads before modern agriculture erased their boundaries. Cattle still break through the bank, treating the fort as ordinary pasture rather than history. What was once a guarded threshold has become a hole in the ground that animals walk through without noticing.
On a rise in grassland. Poorly preserved oval rath (N-S 32m, E-W 23m) defined by a bank with traces of an external fosse at N. The bank is breached by numerous cattle gaps. The above description is derived from the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Galway Vol. II - North Galway'. Compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra and Paul Gosling (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1999). Date of upload: 05 August 2010

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What survives
Recorded monument

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