Ringfort (Cashel), Creggymulgreny, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a low rise above the western shore of Lough Kinlea in County Galway, there is a ringfort that has been almost entirely swallowed by the working landscape around it.
What survives is barely legible: a circular cashel, a type of ringfort built from drystone rather than earthen banks, roughly twenty-five metres in diameter, its outer wall face traceable only in fragments from the south-east around to the south-west, and again from the north-west to the north-east. In between, the enclosure is defined by little more than a natural or man-made scarp in the ground.
The site was recorded by McCaffrey in 1952, and what was noted then reflects centuries of agricultural pressure rather than any sudden act of destruction. Field-clearance rubble, the accumulated stone removed from surrounding pasture over generations to make the land workable, has been piled across the western and north-western arc of the monument. A field wall cuts directly through it at the north-west and south-west, suggesting the enclosure had already lost its legibility as a structure by the time farmers were drawing new boundaries across the ground. The cashel sits on a prominent rise, which would once have made it a visually commanding presence over the surrounding land and the lough below, the elevated position being typical of these early medieval enclosures, which were used as farmsteads and occasionally as places of status or defence.