Caherbulligin, Caherbulligin, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In a small woodland plantation in County Galway, ringed by ordinary pastureland, there is a cashel that has essentially swallowed itself.
The enclosing wall of this early medieval stone fort, once nearly two metres thick and built from massive stones packed with rubble, has been reduced to its foundations, and the interior, thirty-two metres across, has been described as rough and rocky underfoot. What little remains above ground is now largely invisible behind dense, impenetrable thorn and scrub, making the site almost entirely inaccessible to anyone who turns up expecting to walk it.
The structure was recorded in 1916 by Redington, who noted walls of huge stones with rubble fill and an entrance on the north-east side. The interior at that point still held two filled-in souterrains, underground stone-lined passages or chambers that were a characteristic feature of early Irish settlements, typically used for storage or, in some interpretations, refuge. By 1952, McCaffrey was classifying it as a circular stone fort with an enclosing wall composed of two faces of blocks set on edge, though by then the wall stood barely half a metre high. A cashel, to give the type its proper name, is a ringfort built of dry-stone walling rather than an earthen bank, and they occur widely across the west of Ireland, usually dating from the early medieval period. This one, given its internal diameter and the reported scale of its stonework, would once have been a substantial enclosure.
For anyone inclined to look, the plantation setting means the site sits within an otherwise open agricultural landscape, but the thorn and scrub that had made it inaccessible at the time of inspection should be treated as a serious warning. The archaeology here is largely below or at ground level, and the growth above it is not the kind that yields easily.