Ringfort, Ballydonnellan, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Ballydonnellan, Co. Galway

At Ballydonnellan in County Galway, a cashel sits on a gentle south-facing slope, most of it invisible beneath the field walls that have grown up around and over it.

A cashel is a type of ringfort enclosed by a drystone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one measures roughly 35 metres in diameter. Only at its north-eastern arc does any original stonework remain clearly legible; everywhere else, the structure has been absorbed into the later agricultural landscape, its boundary quietly repurposed rather than demolished.

The interior does not offer much easier reading. Densely overgrown and crossed by three ruinous field walls, the enclosed space gives little sense of the early medieval farmstead it once likely contained. Those internal walls are probably modern additions, the kind of subdivision that happened as land was worked and reworked across generations, each practical alteration making it harder to read what came before. The site is catalogued in the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, Vol. II, covering North Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and published in 1999, which places it among the many such monuments scattered across this part of Connacht.

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Pete F
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