Ringfort, Kilskeagh, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Kilskeagh, Co. Galway

In the low-lying grassland and rock outcrop of Kilskeagh in County Galway, a later field wall cuts straight through what was once a deliberate and substantial enclosure, bisecting a structure that predates it by many centuries.

The intrusion is a small but telling detail: the landscape has been reorganised so many times that an earlier world simply got parcelled up and folded in.

What survives at Kilskeagh is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from drystone rather than earthen banks. Where earthen ringforts were formed by digging a circular ditch and piling up the spoil, a cashel used dry-laid stone walls to define a roughly circular enclosed space, typically serving as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. This particular example is subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 42 metres east to west and 38 metres north to south, dimensions that suggest it was once a fairly substantial enclosure. The defining wall has largely collapsed, leaving a spread of stone that is now poorly preserved, and the later field wall crosses it at both the east-north-east and west-south-west, further disturbing the original fabric. The result is a site that reads less as a monument and more as a faint interruption in the everyday agricultural ground around it.

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Pete F
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