Ringfort (Cashel), Caherfurvaus, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Caherfurvaus, Co. Galway

On a low but prominent rise in the tillage fields of Caherfurvaus in County Galway sits a cashel, a type of stone ringfort built with drystone walling rather than the earthen banks more commonly seen across Ireland.

What makes this particular site quietly compelling is not what can be seen but what cannot. The circular enclosure, measuring just over 23 metres in diameter, still holds its shape, but the wall that defines it is largely buried beneath decades of accumulated bushes and field-clearance rubble. A gap on the north-north-west side looks like a modern intrusion rather than an original entrance, which means even the threshold is uncertain.

Earlier accounts suggest the site was once considerably more complex. Writing in 1916, a researcher named Redington described a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or concealment, running beneath the northern half of the interior. The same account noted a possible annexe on the western side of the monument, an additional enclosed area with walls recorded as between 2.4 and 2.7 metres thick and measuring roughly 28 by 23 metres. These are substantial features, but none of them are visible at ground level today. A subsequent account from 1952 also documented the site, confirming its presence without recovering what the earlier observer had described. Whatever the souterrain and annexe looked like when Redington saw them, they have since been absorbed back into the landscape.

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