Ringfort (Cashel), Aggard More, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Aggard More, Co. Galway

Some archaeological sites are celebrated for what survives.

This one is quietly notable for what does not. Somewhere in the scrubland of Aggard More in County Galway, a cashel, a type of ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, appears on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 33 metres east to west and 31 metres north to south. It was mapped, measured, and recorded. Then, as far as anyone who went looking could tell, it effectively ceased to exist.

When the archaeologist McCaffrey catalogued the site in 1952, classifying it as a possible stone fort, he noted it simply as "Not present" during his survey visit. The structure had not been demolished or excavated; it had merely become invisible. A reinspection in May 1983 fared no better, dense overgrowth making it impossible to locate. Complicating matters further, a NNW to SSE field boundary visible on the 1933 edition of the six-inch map may run directly through the site, potentially bisecting whatever remains of the original enclosure. It is possible that the cashel was dismantled over time, its stones robbed out for field walls or building material, a fate common enough across rural Ireland. It is equally possible that it lies beneath decades of vegetation, its outline intact but buried under scrub.

What makes this site worth noting is less any particular drama and more the ordinary attrition of the landscape. A feature substantial enough to be mapped with reasonable precision in 1838 had become, within little more than a century, something surveyors could not find on foot. The record of its absence is, in its way, as informative as a record of its presence would have been.

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