Ringfort (Cashel), Caherbroder, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Caherbroder, Co. Galway

In the level grassland of Caherbroder, Co. Galway, a large oval enclosure sits in a state of slow dissolution.

What was once a cashel, a type of stone ringfort built from drystone walling without mortar, now survives mainly as a collapsed rubble line tracing a subcircular shape across the ground. Measuring roughly 53 metres from northwest to southeast and 44 metres east to west, it is a substantial structure in terms of its footprint, even if little of its original height remains.

Cashels of this kind are associated broadly with early medieval Ireland, serving as enclosed farmsteads for a family and their livestock, their thick stone walls offering both a boundary marker and a degree of protection. The wall at Caherbroder has not worn away evenly. At the southwestern arc, field-clearance rubble, stone gathered and deposited over generations of agricultural tidying, has merged with the enclosing element and now obscures it almost entirely. Elsewhere, several gaps in the circuit appear to be the result of more recent interference rather than simple age. The name itself, Caherbroder, contains the Irish word caher or cathair, a common place-name element that typically signals the former presence of a stone fort, suggesting the structure was prominent enough in the landscape to give its name to the townland long before the wall began to collapse.

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Pete F
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