Ringfort (Cashel), Barbersfort, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Barbersfort, Co. Galway

A small hillock in the townland of Barbersfort, County Galway, carries the remains of an oval cashel, a type of ringfort built from drystone rather than earthen banks, that has been quietly collapsing into the landscape for centuries.

What makes the site quietly interesting is not just the enclosure itself, measuring roughly 27.5 metres east to west and 23.6 metres north to south, but the cluster of features gathered around and within it, each one a fragment of an earlier pattern of settlement that is now only just legible on the ground.

The cashel's perimeter wall has largely fallen, though traces of deliberate wall-facing survive at the southern and north-western stretches, enough to show that the structure was once carefully built rather than simply piled up. A gap about 2.3 metres wide on the western side may be the original entrance, the point through which people and animals once passed in and out. Immediately inside, in the north-eastern quadrant of the enclosure, an oval hollow defined by a low bank on its western side has been interpreted as the remains of a house, roughly 7.6 metres long and 3.6 metres wide. Butting up against the monument on the south-eastern side is a rectangular area of around 7.8 by 5.5 metres, bounded by an earth and stone bank, which appears to be associated with the main enclosure, perhaps a small annexe or outwork of the kind sometimes used for livestock. About 100 metres to the north-west sits a second, possibly related, enclosure, raising the possibility that the hillock and its immediate surroundings formed part of a wider early medieval landscape rather than a single isolated farmstead.

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Pete F
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