Ringfort, Cahertinny, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Cahertinny, Co. Galway

At Cahertinny in County Galway, a ringfort survives only as a name on old maps and a fragment of local memory.

Ringforts, the circular enclosures of earth or stone that once served as farmsteads and defended homesteads across early medieval Ireland, were built in their thousands between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one has left nothing above ground. Where the enclosure once stood, there is now a silage pit.

The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as an irregular field, roughly 32 metres east to west and 27 metres north to south, with a roadway running around it from the west to the north-east, suggesting the enclosure was still legible in the landscape at that point, shaping the way people moved through the land around it. By the time the map was revised in 1929, that definition had softened considerably; the cartographers could only trace a curving field boundary running from the south-south-east through west to the north-north-east, open entirely on the eastern side. Local information recorded alongside the site refers simply to a "small fort" having stood here, which is the sum of what oral tradition appears to have preserved. No visible surface traces survive today.

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