Ringfort (Cashel), Caherglassaun, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
Most ancient enclosures announce themselves.
This one barely does. Set in flat pastureland in Caherglassaun, County Galway, what survives of this cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort typical of early medieval Ireland, amounts to little more than a collapsed line in the ground and a single surviving course of large boulder facing at the north-east.
The structure was originally a circular cashel roughly 34 metres in diameter, its boundary formed by a drystone wall, that is, stone laid without mortar, relying on careful placement and weight alone. That wall is now largely gone. A modern field wall has been built directly over the enclosing element along the western to northern arc, and runs alongside it externally to the east, making it difficult to separate the ancient from the agricultural. To the south, nothing of the original wall remains at all. What the north-east corner preserves, one course of boulder-faced stonework, is the only unambiguous trace of the cashel's original construction. It is easy to overlook, and that is rather the point: centuries of farming, field clearance, and wall-building have quietly cannibalised the site until the early medieval enclosure and the working landscape around it have become almost indistinguishable from one another.