Cahercrin, Cahercrin, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ringforts

Cahercrin, Cahercrin, Co. Galway

A large circular stone enclosure sits on a rise in the pastureland of Cahercrin in County Galway, its drystone wall still largely intact after what must be many centuries.

The cashel, a type of early Irish stone fort built without mortar, measures just over fifty metres in diameter, placing it among the more substantial examples of its kind. A gap of roughly two metres in the south-southeast section of the wall may represent the original entrance, and a laneway has at some point been driven straight through the northeast quadrant, cutting across the interior in a way that speaks to generations of practical, unreflective land use.

Early twentieth-century investigators documented considerably more than the bare enclosure. Writing in 1916 and 1919 respectively, Redington and Westropp both recorded the presence of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, along with late house foundations and several rectangular enclosures inside the cashel. Notably, some of those interior walls were built with mortar rather than dry construction, suggesting later phases of occupation and adaptation long after the original fort was raised. By the time of McCaffrey's account in 1952, and evidently still today, dense overgrowth of trees and bushes had obscured all of these features, leaving the site in a condition where the written record knows more than the eye can see.

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Pete F
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