Ringfort (Cashel), Ballycolgan, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a low rise in the grassland of Ballycolgan, with a lake visible to the east, the remains of an early medieval homestead are easy to miss entirely.
What survives is a partial arc of low earthen and stone bank, curving from the eastern side around through the south and west of a circle roughly 32 metres across. The rest has vanished, leaving no trace above the surface, so that only one segment of the original enclosure remains to suggest what once stood here.
The site is classified as a cashel, a term used in Irish archaeology for a ringfort defined by a stone or stone-and-earth wall, as distinct from a rath, which relies on earthen banks and ditches alone. Ringforts were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a farming family and their livestock within a defended enclosure, and many thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This example in north Galway is among the more fragmentary. The diameter of 32 metres places it within the typical range for such enclosures, and its position on a slight natural rise overlooking water follows a pattern seen widely across the Irish landscape, where elevation and proximity to a lake or stream offered both practical advantage and a degree of visibility. What caused the greater part of the bank to disappear is unrecorded, though centuries of agriculture and land clearance have reduced countless similar sites to far less than their original extent.