Ringfort, Biggera More, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a west-facing slope in Biggera More, County Galway, the ground holds the quiet outline of an early medieval homestead, its walls long since fallen but still legible to anyone who knows what to look for.
This is a cashel, a ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, and its oval perimeter, measuring roughly thirty metres north to south and just under twenty-five metres east to west, survives as a collapsed band of drystone masonry. Where the rubble has not entirely settled, traces of the original inner and outer wall-facing are still visible, giving a sense of how substantial the structure once was.
Cashels of this kind were the standard unit of rural settlement across Ireland for much of the first millennium and into the early medieval period. A farming family, probably of some local standing, would have enclosed their dwelling and outbuildings within such a wall, which served as much as a marker of status and a boundary for livestock as it did a defensive barrier. At Biggera More, within the north-western quarter of the interior, a circular stone structure roughly two and a half metres across survives beneath a covering of grass. It may represent a small house or ancillary building, the kind of modest internal structure that sometimes accompanied the main domestic arrangements within a cashel enclosure. Its precise function is uncertain, but its placement close to the wall rather than at the centre of the space is consistent with what has been observed at comparable sites elsewhere.