Ringfort (Cashel), Caherateige, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Caherateige, Co. Galway

There is something quietly unsettling about a place that has been formally recorded, measured, and named, yet leaves nothing for the eye to find.

At Caherateige in County Galway, a ringfort once sat within a rock outcrop, its circular drystone wall enclosing a space roughly 23.4 metres across. Today, no visible surface trace of it survives.

The site was classified by McCaffrey in 1952 as a cashel, the term used in Irish archaeology for a stone-walled ringfort, as distinct from the earthen-banked raths more common elsewhere in the country. Cashels were built by enclosing an area, usually a farmstead, within a wall of dry-laid stone, without mortar, sometimes several metres thick. This one sat among the grey limestone outcrops that characterise much of Galway's terrain. At the time McCaffrey recorded it, a modern structure, approximately 9.7 metres by 5.5 metres, stood just outside the monument to the south-west. Whether that building contributed to the site's eventual disappearance, or whether the cashel was already fragmenting into the rock from which it had been built, the record does not say. What remains is a name, a diameter, and a grid reference pointing to something that has, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist above ground.

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