Ringfort (Cashel), Aucloggeen, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
A modern townland boundary runs straight through this early medieval enclosure in Aucloggeen, bisecting it from east to west as though the administrative needs of later centuries had no interest in what came before.
The site is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined not by an earthen bank but by a drystone wall, oval in plan and measuring roughly 44 metres east to west and 38 metres north to south. That wall survives best to the south of the boundary line that cuts it, and it is in the southern sector of the interior that the most legible remains are concentrated.
Two internal structures survive within that southern portion. The larger of the two is a rectangular building, oriented east to west, roughly 10 metres long and just over 6 metres wide, with an internal division marked out by a line of boulders and small stones, suggesting it may have served more than one function or housed more than one household activity. Beside it, to the east, is a considerably smaller D-shaped structure, less than 2 metres in length, possibly a hut or outbuilding of some kind. Both are built in the same drystone manner as the outer cashel wall. Cashels of this type are generally associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and were typically farmsteads housing a single family and their livestock within a defensive or status-marking enclosure. The presence of two distinct internal structures here hints at a domestic arrangement that was modest but organised.