Ringfort (Cashel), Turlough, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a north-facing slope in County Galway, a roughly circular enclosure sits quietly in the grassland, its ancient drystone wall now so thoroughly grassed over that it reads more as a gentle earthwork than a structure built by human hands.
This is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone rather than an earthen bank, and at roughly 48 metres east to west and 44 metres north to south, it is a substantial example of a monument type that once served as a defended farmstead for an early medieval family of some local standing.
Cashels are found across Ireland, but they cluster particularly in areas where stone was more readily available than soil deep enough for cutting a bank and ditch. The wall here is best preserved along the southern arc, where the original drystone construction, stones laid without mortar in careful courses, is most legible. Several breaches elsewhere in the circuit appear to be of modern rather than ancient origin, the kind of gap that opens up over centuries of agricultural use, when a convenient ready-made wall becomes a convenient ready-made source of building material. What makes this site quietly notable is that it does not stand alone: another ringfort lies roughly 350 metres to the south, suggesting that this part of Turlough sustained a degree of early settlement density that the current landscape, open pasture with little to catch the eye, gives no obvious hint of.