Designed landscape - folly, Caherweelder, Co. Galway
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Designed Landscapes
At Caherweelder in County Galway, a small stone structure sits embedded in the wall of an ancient cashel, and nobody is entirely sure what it was for.
A cashel is a type of early medieval stone enclosure, essentially a ring-fort built from dry stone rather than earth, and this one has acquired an unusual addition at its north-north-western wall: a solid rectangular block of masonry, three metres high, roughly six metres long and just under three metres wide, that does not quite fit the profile of anything functional. It may have been a lookout point. It may have been built simply for the pleasure of building it, which would make it a folly in the traditional sense, an architectural gesture with no purpose beyond its own existence.
The structure does not appear on the first or second editions of the Ordnance Survey maps but is marked and named simply as "Tower" on the third edition, published in 1933. That label raises more questions than it answers. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted the site in 1919, and a later reference by McCaffrey in 1952 catalogued it among similar features in the region. Beyond those citations, the historical record is quiet. The solid construction, as opposed to a hollow tower that might serve as a storage chamber or defensive position, points away from purely practical origins, though a solid platform could in principle have supported a timber or earthen viewing surface above. What seems clear is that whoever added it to the cashel wall did so well after the original enclosure was built, grafting something new onto something very old.