Caherlee, Ballinillaun, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
What stood at Ballinillaun until 1991 was a cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort defined by a drystone enclosing wall, and by the time anyone thought to record it properly, a bulldozer had already done its work.
The site no longer exists in any meaningful physical sense, which makes the documentation that survives all the more pointed. A circular enclosure roughly 38 metres across once sat on a slight rise in scrubland in County Galway, its drystone wall intact enough to be described as fairly well-preserved when surveyors visited in December 1982. Inside, traces of internal dividing walls were visible to the east and west, and a rectangular house site occupied the north-western quadrant of the interior.
The picture was more complex than the enclosure alone suggested. A researcher named McCaffrey, writing in 1952, had recorded additional features around the cashel: a rectangular structure built against the southern wall, and a semicircular wall of around 40 metres running immediately to the east. That outer wall partly enclosed two further features, one of them described as a souterrain, the other as a house site. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlement and used variously for storage, refuge, or both. A sixth house site lay roughly 15 metres to the north. By the time of the 1982 visit, none of these outer features left any visible surface trace. The cashel itself, the one substantial thing still standing, was bulldozed in 1991, nine years after it was formally recorded and surveyed. Earlier references appear in Redington's 1912 account of the area, suggesting the site had been known and noted for most of the twentieth century before its destruction.