Ringfort (Cashel), Loughcurra, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Loughcurra, Co. Galway

On the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, a neat circular enclosure sits in the gently undulating pastureland near Loughcurra in County Galway.

It measures roughly 36 metres across, carefully recorded by nineteenth-century cartographers and preserved on paper for well over a century. When archaeologists went to inspect the site in November 1982, there was nothing there at all.

The enclosure had, according to local information, been removed in the early 1950s, a period when land improvement schemes and shifting agricultural priorities led to the clearance of many such earthworks across Ireland. What had stood there was likely a ringfort, and possibly a cashel, the term used for a ringfort whose enclosing boundary was built from stone rather than an earthen bank and ditch. Cashels are relatively common in the west of Ireland, where stone was more readily available than soil suitable for banking, and they typically date from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, often serving as farmsteads for a single family or small community. Whatever this particular example looked like in the flesh, it left no surface trace by the time anyone thought to record it in person. Aerial imagery subsequently revealed something quietly pointed: a house had been built in the south-western quadrant of the former interior, slotting itself into the footprint of a structure that predated it by perhaps a thousand years, without any visible acknowledgement that it had done so.

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