Ringfort (Cashel), Cahernamuck, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cahernamuck, Co. Galway

Between a mound and a maze, the cashel at Cahernamuck is a site that rewards patience and a decent pair of boots.

A cashel is a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earth, and this one is bivallate, meaning it was originally enclosed by two concentric drystone walls separated by a fosse, the shallow ditch running between them. What makes it particularly unusual is what time has done to those walls. The inner wall, originally around 3.7 metres wide, has slumped so severely on both faces that it now spreads to a maximum width of ten metres, a grassed-over stony ridge that feels more like a low hill than a defensive structure. A single course of large squared-off limestone facing-blocks is still visible around its circuit, most clearly on the northern side, offering a glimpse of the deliberate, dressed stonework that once defined the whole.

The interior measures roughly 42 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, a substantial enclosure in undulating grassland. No entrance is visible anywhere along the circuit, and no causeway crosses the fosse, which runs from the south-west around through the north to the south-east and is now dense with thistles, nettles, ferns, and the stumps of dead trees. The outer wall, lower and narrower at around 3.5 metres wide, survives along a similar arc and at some later point had a field wall built directly on top of it, a commonplace reuse of ready-dressed stone that quietly erased the boundary between ancient monument and working farmland. Inside, collapsed stone banks beneath the vegetation may represent the remains of internal divisions or subsidiary structures. In the northern sector, a collapsed souterrain adds another layer of complexity; a souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlement and used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation. Its presence here suggests the cashel was once a functioning settlement rather than a purely defensive enclosure.

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