Ringfort (Cashel), Ballynascragh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In a reclaimed pasture field in Ballynascragh, County Galway, a modern field wall cuts straight through an ancient enclosure as though the latter simply were not there.
That indifference is, in its own way, a small piece of social history. The monument in question is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a drystone rather than earthen boundary, and this one measures roughly 42 metres across. It is poorly preserved, its circular wall reduced and broken, but enough survives to trace the outline of something that once organised the lives of early medieval farming families.
Within the interior, the site holds a souterrain and the remains of two house sites. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement; they are thought to have served as cool storage spaces and possible refuges. The combination of a cashel enclosure, domestic structures, and a souterrain is fairly characteristic of early medieval rural life in Ireland, when a family or small community would have built a defended farmstead of this kind. The site was recorded by McCaffrey in 1952, who listed it among a catalogue of similar monuments in the region. The field wall that now clips the monument at its south-east and south-west-west edges arrived later, its builders evidently more concerned with managing livestock than with preserving what lay beneath their fenceline.