Ringfort (Cashel), Cloghboley, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cloghboley, Co. Galway

Among the limestone outcrops of Cloghboley in County Galway, a circle of collapsed stone sits low against the rock, easy to overlook and easier still to misread.

What remains is a cashel, a type of ringfort built entirely from stone rather than earth and timber, its enclosing wall now largely fallen but still traceable as a roughly circular spread of drystone rubble some 24 metres across. Cashels of this kind were typically used as defended farmsteads during the early medieval period, enclosing a household and its animals within a sturdy stone boundary. This one has worn down considerably, though its outline endures.

The most intriguing detail is inside. Towards the eastern part of the interior, a smaller circular arrangement of stone, around 4.5 metres in diameter, may represent the footprint of a house, the sort of round stone dwelling that would have sat within the cashel's protection. Two further drystone structures complicate the picture: one near the western side of the interior, and one just outside the cashel wall to the south-east. These are thought to be later additions, built after the original enclosure was already in use or perhaps already in decline, suggesting the site saw more than one phase of activity. The site was noted by McCaffrey in 1952, catalogued as number six in a sequence of local monuments, though it has attracted little attention since.

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Pete F
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