Ringfort (Cashel), Ballynakilla, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballynakilla, Co. Galway

In the scrubland at Ballynakilla in County Galway, a small hillock marks the site of an early Irish cashel that has, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.

A cashel is a type of ringfort defined by a stone enclosure wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one measured roughly thirty metres in diameter. Nothing of that wall survives above ground today. What remains is essentially a cartographic ghost, a circle drawn on paper that once corresponded to something solid in the landscape.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in Ireland during the nineteenth century, recorded the site as a circular enclosure, which is how we know it was there at all. Those early OS surveys captured countless monuments that were already in decline, and in many cases the map entry is the last reliable evidence of a structure's existence. Whether this cashel was dismantled for building material, gradually collapsed, or was simply swallowed by the encroaching scrub is not recorded. All that can be said is that by the time systematic archaeological attention was paid to the area, no visible surface trace survived.

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Pete F
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