Ringfort (Cashel), Tullira, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a south-west-facing slope in the rough pastureland of County Galway, a circular stone fort sits half-swallowed by its own history.
Once part of the demesne of Tullira Castle, this cashel, as stone-walled ringforts are generally known, measures roughly 47 metres across at its widest point. By 1961 it had been reduced, at least in description, to a circular mound planted with trees. The ground tells a more complicated story.
When McCaffrey catalogued the site in 1952, the defining wall was already in poor condition, standing to a height of around 0.9 metres and better preserved on the western side than anywhere else. By the time fieldwork was carried out in November 1982, the wall's base had spread to a width of 4.2 metres, its inner face standing roughly 0.7 metres high and its outer face 1.3 metres, the difference suggesting considerable collapse and slumping over time. The construction method was typical of the type: two dressed stone faces enclosing a rubble core. In the north-east sector, a later field boundary had been laid directly over the wall, obliterating that section entirely. Ringing the fort outside the wall, investigators also recorded a shallow flat-bottomed fosse, a ditch designed to add a further line of defence, and a broad low bank beyond that, together hinting at the original complexity of the enclosure. Inside, the ground was overgrown and uneven, but two features survived in the south-west quadrant: the entrance to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement, used variously for storage or refuge; and the overgrown foundations of a rectangular structure whose date and function remain unrecorded.