Ringfort (Cashel), Cloonnahaha, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cloonnahaha, Co. Galway

On the Ordnance Survey maps of County Galway, a small circle is drawn in the pastureland near the Cannahowna River, quietly marking a place where nothing whatsoever can now be seen.

No wall, no earthwork, no depression in the grass: the site has vanished entirely from the surface, leaving only a cartographic ghost some 90 metres west of the river.

What the maps record is a circular enclosure roughly 28 metres in diameter, most likely a cashel. A cashel is a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, a form of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the twelfth century. They were the homes of farming families, the walls serving as much to contain livestock as to provide defence. This particular example in Cloonnahaha may have resembled a second cashel that survives approximately 370 metres to the southwest, suggesting that this small stretch of east Galway once supported at least two such enclosures in relatively close proximity, a reminder that the early medieval landscape was far more densely settled than the open fields of today might suggest. Without any surface trace remaining here, the site is known almost entirely through its presence on the OS maps, and whatever stone once formed its walls was long since carted away or absorbed into field boundaries and buildings elsewhere.

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Pete F
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