Ringfort (Cashel), Cahermore, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a south-west-facing slope in Cahermore, County Galway, a rough circle of collapsed stone marks what was once a cashel, a type of ringfort built from drystone walling rather than earthen banks.
The distinction matters: where earthwork ringforts were raised from the soil, cashels were constructed in regions where stone was plentiful and earth less workable, their walls enclosing a farmstead or a family's livestock against the pressures of early medieval life. This one measures roughly 24 metres north to south and 23 metres east to west, making it a modest but not insignificant example of the form.
The structure is now poorly preserved, its defining wall reduced largely to rubble, though the near-circular outline of the enclosure can still be traced across the ridge slope. Cashels of this kind were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for free farming families within the Gaelic social order. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of decay, often unexcavated and unrecorded in local memory, absorbed quietly into the landscape over centuries of agricultural use and gradual collapse.