Ringfort (Cashel), Carrowrevagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In the gently rolling pastureland of Carrowrevagh, a roughly circular arrangement of collapsed drystone marks out an enclosure that has been quietly dissolving into the landscape for centuries.
What survives is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, measuring roughly 33.7 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west. Cashels were typically used during the early medieval period as enclosed farmsteads or the fortified residences of local farming families, and this one, though poorly preserved, still holds enough of its original form to read as a deliberate structure rather than a random scatter of field stone.
The most legible section of the enclosing wall survives at the south-east, where the drystone construction is best preserved. At the northern side, two upright stones, orthostats, set roughly 0.7 metres apart may represent the original entrance gap, the threshold through which people and livestock would have passed daily. The site was noted by McCaffrey in 1952. A later field wall, built to divide working agricultural land, cuts directly through the western side of the enclosure, a practical intrusion that quietly illustrates how these ancient boundaries have been absorbed, overwritten, and occasionally dismantled by subsequent generations of farming.