Ringfort (Cashel), Drumharsna, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Drumharsna, Co. Galway

In the grassland of Drumharsna, Co. Galway, a large circular enclosure sits almost invisibly at ground level, its presence most legible from the air rather than on foot.

What was once a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort typically used as a defended farmstead or settlement during the early medieval period, has been so thoroughly levelled that little of its original height survives above the surface. That near-erasure makes it easy to overlook, yet the scale of the structure, once you know what you are looking at, is considerable.

When the archaeologist McCaffrey catalogued the site in 1952, he recorded a circular stone fort roughly 65 metres in diameter, its defining wall approximately 1.82 metres wide and 0.83 metres high at that time. The wall itself was described as composed of two faces of blocks set on edge, a construction method in which upright slabs form the outer and inner skins of the wall, with rubble or smaller stones packed between them. This kind of drystone technique is characteristic of cashels found across the west of Ireland, where field clearance provided ready building material and where the enclosure served both practical and social functions for farming communities. By the time of McCaffrey's visit, the structure was already in decline; today its outline, while clearly visible on aerial photography, has been reduced further still by the slow processes of agricultural use and stone removal.

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Pete F
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