Ringfort (Cashel), Curtaun, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a low hillock in Curtaun, County Galway, there sits a cashel so thoroughly reduced by time and land clearance that its outline is barely legible in the ground.
A cashel is a type of ringfort whose enclosing wall was built from drystone rather than earthen banks, and this one now survives only as a collapsed scatter of stone, further buried and confused by rubble pushed aside during scrubland clearance. What was once a roughly circular enclosure, measuring around 22 metres across at its widest, has been compressed into something closer to a puzzle than a monument.
The site is subcircular in plan, oriented northeast to southwest at about 22.3 metres and northwest to southeast at roughly 19.5 metres. Those dimensions are consistent with the modest domestic cashels found across the west of Ireland, structures that typically served as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. The drystone wall that once defined this enclosure has slumped and spread, and field-clearance activity has added a further layer of rubble on top, making it difficult to distinguish original fabric from later disturbance. There is no surviving entrance feature recorded, and no internal structures are noted.
