Ringfort (Cashel), Creggymulgreny, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Creggymulgreny, Co. Galway

In the undulating pastureland of Creggymulgreny, a cashel sits quietly being absorbed by the landscape around it.

A cashel is a type of ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one, roughly 47 metres north to south and 42 metres east to west, has not fared especially well against the centuries. What survives is a subcircular outline, its drystone wall most legible along the northern and eastern arc, while the western half has been progressively buried under a later field wall and the accumulated rubble of land clearance. A second field wall runs straight across the monument from north to south, cutting through the interior as though the cashel were simply another inconvenience to be divided up and managed.

When surveyors first examined the site in June 1992, that eastern arc still gave a reasonable impression of the original enclosure. By the time of a revisit in October 2001, the interior to the east of the intruding field wall had become completely overgrown, suggesting the kind of gradual erasure that happens when a site sits on productive farmland and no active effort is made to hold back the vegetation. The monument is noted in McCaffrey's 1952 survey, which at least establishes that it was recognised and recorded in the mid-twentieth century. Associated with the cashel are a possible souterrain, an underground passage typically used for storage or refuge in early medieval Ireland, and a possible house site, both of which hint at a once-functioning settlement rather than a purely defensive enclosure.

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Pete F
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