Ringfort (Cashel), Bolisheen, Co. Galway

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Ringfort (Cashel), Bolisheen, Co. Galway

At Bolisheen in County Galway, a cashel sits in a field so thoroughly dismantled by time and agricultural use that most of it has simply ceased to be visible.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the drystone equivalent of the earthen raths found across Ireland, typically dating to the early medieval period and built to enclose a farmstead or small settlement. Here, only the north-eastern sector retains any trace of collapsed wall, and along the southern and western arcs the boundary has been reduced to a barely perceptible scarp just thirty centimetres high. To the north, the ground gives nothing away at all.

What makes the site more than merely a faded field feature is its position within a wider cluster of monuments. Roughly three hundred metres to the north-east lies a separate cashel, suggesting that this area of North Galway once held a concentration of early medieval activity rather than a single isolated settlement. Two later field walls now cut through the interior, the ordinary business of post-medieval farming laid directly across whatever arrangement of buildings or yards the cashel once enclosed. The monument measures some fifty-one metres in diameter, which, even allowing for the loss of most of its wall, indicates a reasonably substantial enclosure in its day.

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