Ringfort (Cashel), Barbersfort, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Barbersfort, Co. Galway

What survives at Barbersfort is less a monument than a memory of one.

A cashel, the term used for a ringfort whose enclosing boundary was built primarily of stone rather than earth, once wrapped around a low hillock in the gently rolling farmland of north Galway. At its widest it measured roughly 40 metres east to west, a subcircular enclosure of modest but respectable size. A field wall running east to west has since bisected the site entirely, and whatever once stood to the north of that line has vanished from view. The southern half fares only a little better: a poorly preserved scarp curves from east to south-east, and a bank of earth and stone carries on from there toward the south-south-west. An old field bank presses against the monument from the east. The OS six-inch map of 1927 still shows the enclosure clearly enough, which makes it a useful measure of how much has been lost in less than a century.

Within the southern remnant, a subrectangular depression roughly 12 metres long and 6 metres wide, defined by a low bank of earth and stone, may represent the footprint of a house site. That tentative identification is worth pausing over. Ringforts of this kind were typically settled farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and internal house platforms are a reasonably common find within them, though rarely well preserved. Here the depression survives just clearly enough to suggest domestic occupation without yielding much certainty about it. A second ringfort lies approximately 100 metres to the south-east, a reminder that these enclosures frequently appear in loose clusters across the Irish landscape, reflecting a pattern of dispersed family farming rather than nucleated settlement.

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