Ringfort (Cashel), Cahercon, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cahercon, Co. Galway

In the level pastureland of Cahercon in County Galway, a circular enclosure roughly 43 metres across has been slowly disappearing into the landscape for centuries.

What was once a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a drystone wall rather than an earthen bank, has collapsed so thoroughly that its boundary is now little more than a grassed-over ridge threading through dense trees and briars. The name cashel, derived from the Irish caiseal, typically describes a stone-built fortified enclosure of early medieval date, and they were once a common feature of the Irish countryside. This one has been absorbed so completely by vegetation that the monument is barely legible as a structure at all.

Despite its dilapidated condition, the site preserves two features of genuine interest beneath the overgrowth. In the northern half of the interior there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that in early medieval Ireland was commonly used for storage or as a place of refuge, and which often survives long after the surface structures around it have crumbled. At the centre of the enclosure there is also a possible house site, suggesting that the cashel once functioned as a domestic settlement, with a family or small community living within its protective stone wall. The pairing of a souterrain and a house site within a cashel is a fairly typical arrangement for the period, though the combination rarely survives in any readable form, and here the vegetation has made even that difficult to assess.

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