Ringfort (Cashel), Caherskeehaun, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Caherskeehaun, Co. Galway

Beneath the pastureland of Caherskeehaun, a stone-walled enclosure has been slowly dissolving back into the landscape for centuries.

The cashel, a type of ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than an earthen bank, once formed a roughly circular enclosure measuring around 35 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west. What survives today is fragmentary, defined by intermittent stretches of inner and outer facing-stones, the northern section still reaching a width of 3.5 metres, hinting at the bulk the wall once had. Two upright boulders at the south-south-east mark where the original entrance stood, a gap of about 1.6 metres, just wide enough to suggest the purposeful architecture of an earlier settlement. The interior slopes and is scattered with loose boulders, the whole thing sitting on a low north-south ridge amid ordinary farmland.

The site's most quietly remarkable feature lies beneath the surface. In the western half of the interior there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, likely used for storage, refuge, or both. Field walls that appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1933, running along the northwest, northeast, and southeast of the site, have since collapsed considerably, meaning the visible archaeology has continued to diminish even within living memory. McCaffrey noted the cashel in 1950, cataloguing it among a broader survey of the region's monuments, and even then its condition was described as very poor. The site sits within a broader Galway landscape that contains many such enclosures, but few where the entrance stones and souterrain survive together, however ruinously.

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