Caherbrogan, Killeeneen More, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
Some places earn their interest not from what remains but from what has ceased to remain.
In a stretch of level pastureland in Killeeneen More, County Galway, there is a site recorded under the name Caherbrogan, a caher being a type of stone ringfort, typically a circular enclosure defined by a dry-stone wall, common across the west of Ireland. Nothing of it can be seen today. No earthwork, no scatter of stone, no depression in the grass. The place persists only in the paper record, a cartographic ghost.
The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 shows a circular enclosure here, roughly sixty metres in diameter, substantial enough to have registered clearly to the surveyors working across Connacht in that period. By the time the revised edition appeared in 1933, the enclosure itself had gone from the landscape, though a field boundary curving from south-southwest to west-northwest may trace the old outline at a remove, the way a scar sometimes reshapes the land around it long after the original feature has disappeared. When a researcher named McCaffrey visited the site in 1952, his assessment was blunt: 'Not present.' No visible surface trace survives.