Ringfort (Cashel), Cloghboley, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cloghboley, Co. Galway

What sets this cashel in Cloghboley apart is not any single dramatic feature but the density of life that its interior still quietly records.

A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one in east Galway sits in flat pastureland that slopes gently southward, its roughly oval footprint measuring around fifty metres east to west and forty-two metres north to south. The boundary wall is substantial and double-faced, meaning it was built with two parallel skins of drystone and the gap between them packed with rubble, a construction method that speaks to some degree of permanence and communal effort. The entrance, a well-defined gap of just under two metres on the south-eastern side, is still clearly legible.

Inside, the ground is not level. A scarp roughly one and a half metres high runs from the west-south-west across to the north-north-east, dividing the enclosure into two nearly equal halves. Whether this feature is natural or was shaped by the site's original occupants is uncertain, and that ambiguity alone makes it worth attention. In the north-western quadrant there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that was typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or, in some interpretations, as a place of refuge. Foundations of four separate house sites are also visible across the interior, suggesting that this was not a single-family farmstead but a small settlement with several structures operating within the same enclosure. McCaffrey noted the site in 1952. A later field wall cuts across the monument from north-east to south-east, a reminder that the surrounding agricultural landscape has continued to reorganise itself around, and occasionally through, what came before.

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