Ringfort (Cashel), Castletaylor, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Castletaylor, Co. Galway

A low drystone wall circles a field in County Galway, its original stonework now heaped with generations of field-clearance rubble, the kind of incremental deposit that happens when farmers move rocks out of the way and the nearest boundary is always just a few steps off.

What makes this particular enclosure more than a tidied field edge is the stile built into the south-western section of the wall, a deliberate opening that appears to have been placed to allow access to a children's burial ground inside.

The structure is a cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, roughly circular in plan and measuring 32.7 metres in diameter. Cashels served as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, their walls defining a protected domestic space rather than a military fortification. This one sits in rolling pastureland near Castletaylor and was recorded by McCaffrey in 1952. The presence of a cillin, as children's burial grounds of this type are known, within its interior adds a layer of later use that is far from unusual in the Irish landscape. From the early modern period onward, unbaptised infants were frequently buried in marginal or liminal places, including ancient enclosures, which were understood to sit outside the boundaries of consecrated ground. The stile in the wall, whether original or added later, suggests the interior continued to be used and visited long after the cashel itself had ceased to function as a settlement. Roughly 150 metres to the north-west, a second cashel occupies the same pastureland, making this a relatively dense concentration of early medieval activity in a corner of south Galway that does not always feature prominently in accounts of the region's archaeology.

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