Ringfort (Cashel), Crannagh, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Crannagh, Co. Galway

There is a ringfort in Crannagh, County Galway, that you cannot see.

No earthwork rises from the ground, no ditch curves through the grass, no stone wall marks a boundary. The site exists almost entirely on paper, preserved in the cartographic memory of a map drawn nearly two centuries ago rather than in anything the eye can catch in the landscape today.

The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a subcircular enclosure at this spot, measuring roughly 38 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and around 32 metres from north-west to south-east. Those dimensions are consistent with a cashel, a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, which would have enclosed a farmstead or small settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries. The land here is described as level and recently reclaimed, which goes some way towards explaining the disappearance. Agricultural improvement, particularly the draining and levelling of ground, has been responsible for the loss of countless such monuments across the country, leaving only the ghost of a former enclosure in an older survey sheet.

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