Ringfort (Cashel), Bolisheen, Co. Galway

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Ringfort (Cashel), Bolisheen, Co. Galway

At Bolisheen in County Galway, the land holds at least three early medieval enclosures in close proximity to one another, a density that suggests this was once a deliberately organised landscape rather than a scattering of isolated farmsteads.

The site in question is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a drystone stone wall rather than the earthen banks more common elsewhere in Ireland, and it sits roughly 350 metres to the south-east of a related cashel, with a third lying immediately to its east.

The cashel measures approximately 60 metres in diameter, which places it at the larger end of the scale for this type of enclosure. In early medieval Ireland, cashels typically served as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small kin group, the stone wall providing both a boundary marker and a degree of protection for livestock. This one, however, is now poorly preserved and heavily overgrown, and a later field wall has been built directly across its interior, a common fate for monuments that were gradually absorbed into the agricultural routine of subsequent centuries. The clustering of cashels here at Bolisheen is the more striking detail; it implies repeated occupation or a socially organised arrangement of holdings across this part of north Galway, though the precise relationship between the enclosures remains unclear.

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