Ringfort (Cashel), Ballinphuil, Co. Galway

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Ringfort (Cashel), Ballinphuil, Co. Galway

On an east-facing slope in the grassland of Ballinphuil, something survives that most people walking past would struggle to identify as a structure at all.

Locally it goes by the name Lisheen, a diminutive that suggests long familiarity, and yet what remains of it is fragmentary enough to pass for a natural rise in the ground. It is a cashel, a type of early medieval ringfort defined by a drystone enclosing wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one measures roughly 38 metres east to west at its widest. Much of that wall has collapsed, and what once formed a clear circuit now reads as a broken line of tumbled stone running from the north-north-east through the south to the west-north-west, with a natural scarp completing the outline elsewhere.

Within the southern half of the interior, a small circular structure about 3.4 metres across survives as a grassed-over ring of stone, most likely the remains of a house. A curving bank of earth and stone, some 26 metres long, radiates outward from the cashel wall at the north-west; its relationship to the main enclosure is uncertain, though it may well be associated with the original complex. The site is also said to contain a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind often built beneath early Irish farmsteads for storage or refuge. Cashels of this type were typically the enclosed farmsteads of prosperous farming families during the early medieval period, perhaps between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and they appear in considerable numbers across the west of Ireland where stone was more readily available than the earthen material used elsewhere to raise banks and ditches.

The site is poorly preserved, and a visitor without some prior knowledge of what to look for might find little that announces itself clearly. The collapsed wall, the interior structure, and the curving outer bank are all heavily overgrown, which makes the local name Lisheen, from the Irish loisín, a little enclosure, feel rather apt for something that has been quietly subsiding back into the hillside for centuries.

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