Ringfort (Cashel), Cloghboley, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cloghboley, Co. Galway

In the scrubland of Cloghboley, County Galway, a circular enclosure sits in a state of quiet collapse, its drystone wall long since fallen but still traceable across the ground.

This is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, and though it measures roughly 25 metres in diameter, it is easy to miss. The wall is not standing. It is a low, spread rubble line that you read more as a texture in the landscape than a structure, the rock breaking through the surface wherever the scrub thins.

What makes the site more interesting than a simple ruin is the evidence of how it was organised. On the eastern side, a gap in the wall is flanked by upright stones, suggesting a formal entrance, the kind of deliberate threshold that would once have marked the boundary between domestic space and the wider world. At the south-eastern arc of the enclosure, an L-shaped foundation of upright stones, running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east and measuring around 3.5 metres long by 2 metres wide, abuts the cashel wall from outside. This may represent an annexe or a small house site added on to the main enclosure, the kind of incremental building that suggests the place was lived in and adapted over time rather than built to a fixed plan. A separate stone structure survives within the interior, and a further house site lies about 60 metres to the east-south-east, hinting that this was once a small but legible settlement cluster. McCaffrey noted the site in 1952, placing it in a wider survey of the area's field monuments.

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Pete F
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