Ringfort (Cashel), Caherateige, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Caherateige, Co. Galway

A stone enclosure set directly into a rock outcrop in County Galway, this cashel sits in fair condition at roughly 28 metres across, its circular drystone wall still legible in the landscape despite the slow encroachment of time and rubble.

A cashel is simply a stone-walled ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement common throughout early medieval Ireland, and this one retains enough of its form to give a sense of the space its inhabitants once organised and defended.

When McCaffrey documented the site in 1952, the interior was considerably more readable. He recorded three rectangular structures built from drystone, alongside what he described as a paving of boulders, suggesting a reasonably complex domestic arrangement within the enclosure. By now, only faint traces of those internal structures survive, visible at the south-east and south-west of the interior. The eastern entrance gap, which would have been the original point of access, is currently obscured by fallen rubble. Perhaps the most intriguing surviving feature is the souterrain in the north-west quadrant. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, usually stone-lined, associated with early medieval settlements and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both. Their presence in a cashel often suggests the site was inhabited for a sustained period, by people with enough reason to invest in that kind of hidden infrastructure.

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