Ringfort (Cashel), Doon, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Doon, Co. Galway

On a south-facing slope near Doon in County Galway, a low grassy ring barely distinguishable from the surrounding pasture turns out to be the remains of an early medieval cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort that once served as an enclosed farmstead or defended residence.

The structure is roughly subcircular, measuring about 33 metres east to west and 31 metres north to south, its perimeter marked by a wall so thoroughly grassed over that it reads now more as a gentle undulation in the field than as a built thing.

What makes this particular cashel worth a second look is a detail at its west-south-west side, where the wall bulges outward around a gap nearly nine metres wide. That outward projection is thought to be original, suggesting this was the designed entrance rather than a later breach. Cashels of this kind are generally associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, when enclosed stone ringforts were a common form of rural settlement across the west of the country. The monument has not escaped the slow reorganisation of the landscape around it; a later field wall cuts straight across the interior, running from the north-north-east down to the south, slicing through the older enclosure with the indifference of a much later agricultural logic.

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Pete F
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