Ringfort (Cashel), An Cheathrú Chaol, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On the gently rolling pastureland of An Cheathrú Chaol in Connemara, a bungalow occupies what was once the wall of an early medieval cashel.
That detail alone says something about how thoroughly a thousand or more years of continuous land use can absorb the past. A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the drystone equivalent of the more familiar earthen rath, and this one sits on a slight rise in the landscape as if trying, not very successfully, to assert itself.
The structure is oval in plan, measuring roughly 30 metres north to south and 41 metres east to west, and what survives of its single enclosing wall runs from the north-east, around through the south, and back to the north-west. That surviving arc is itself in poor condition, much collapsed, and overlain throughout by a modern field wall built directly on top of it. A road cuts through the site at two points, at the south-south-east and north-west. The bungalow built into the south-western portion of the enclosure completes the picture of a monument that has been steadily, if unconsciously, cannibalised by the working landscape around it. Paul Gosling's Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, published in 1993, records all of this without sentiment, cataloguing the site as very poorly preserved.