Ringfort (Cashel), Carrowmore, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On the boundary between the townlands of Carrowmore and Ballynacourty in County Galway, there sits a ringfort that has all but disappeared into the landscape.
The ground here is prone to flooding, and over time the enclosure has sunk below the threshold of ordinary visibility, leaving almost nothing for a passing eye to catch. A single short stretch of drystone walling, roughly four metres long and two metres wide, is about all that remains above ground, and it survives largely because it doubles as the townland boundary marker rather than through any particular effort at preservation.
When Holt recorded it in 1912, he described it as a nameless caher, a term used in the west of Ireland for a stone-walled ringfort, of which roughly a third of the wall was still standing and forming the mearing, that is, the boundary line, between the two townlands. The Ordnance Survey's large-scale plan from the same period, based on fieldwork carried out between 1912 and 1916, shows a roughly circular enclosure about 42 metres in diameter, its outline traced partly by hachure markings from the north-west around through the east to the south, and partly by a curving laneway running back up to the north-west. That combination of surveyed line and physical laneway suggests the fort's perimeter was still legible in the landscape a century ago in a way it simply is not today.
What is curious about this particular site is that while nothing meaningful survives at ground level, the form of the enclosure remains detectable from the air. Aerial photography reveals the outline of the old cashel pressed faintly into the field, a cropmark or soil variation tracing the arc of walls that have otherwise vanished. It is a reminder that early medieval enclosures of this kind, built to protect a farmstead and its inhabitants, do not always disappear entirely so much as retreat into a register that ordinary visits cannot access.