Ringfort (Cashel), Rathcosgry, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In the farmland of Rathcosgry, County Galway, there is a site that exists almost entirely as an absence.
A cashel is a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earth, typically a circular or oval enclosure used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or place of refuge. This one, subcircular in plan and measuring roughly 37 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, was recorded on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, making it a documented feature of the landscape at that time. Today, nothing visible remains at ground level.
The paper trail is thin but telling. When a researcher named McCaffrey surveyed the site in 1952, his note was blunt: 'Not present.' That phrase carries a certain melancholy weight in the archaeology of rural Ireland, where centuries of land clearance, field improvement, and agricultural intensification have quietly erased countless early medieval enclosures. A structure substantial enough to appear on a nineteenth-century map had, within little more than a century of that mapping, vanished entirely from the surface of the ground. Whether it was dismantled for building stone, levelled to improve pasture, or simply worn away, the record does not say.