Ringfort (Cashel), Garracloon, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Garracloon, Co. Galway

In a field of gently rolling pastureland in Garracloon, County Galway, a collapsed ring of stone encloses something that goes well beyond the ordinary archaeology of early medieval Ireland.

What survives here is a cashel, the drystone-walled equivalent of the more familiar earthen ringfort, built from unmortared stone rather than banked earth and ditch. This one is oval in plan, measuring roughly 34.5 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 30.4 metres across, though the wall that once defined those dimensions has long since tumbled, and overgrowth now obscures much of what remains. On its own, a poorly preserved cashel is not unusual in the Irish landscape, where hundreds of such enclosures survive in varying states of ruin. What makes this one quietly different is what lies inside.

Within the interior of the cashel sits a children's burial ground, a type of site known in Irish tradition as a cillín, though that term does not appear in the sources for this place. These were informal, unconsecrated burial grounds used, often from the early modern period onward, for infants who had died before baptism and who were therefore excluded from burial in consecrated churchyards under Catholic practice. The use of a pre-existing ancient enclosure for such burials was not uncommon; the liminal quality of old, half-understood monuments perhaps made them seem appropriate for those who occupied a similarly in-between status. The association here at Garracloon was noted by McCaffrey in 1952, placing the site in a modest body of mid-twentieth-century scholarship that began to document these overlooked places before they disappeared entirely from local memory.

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