Ringfort (Cashel), Doorus, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
What survives of this cashel at Doorus is a curved fragment, an arc of drystone wall sweeping from south through west to northwest across level pastureland.
A cashel is a ringfort built of stone rather than earth and timber, a form of enclosed farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, and this one would once have formed a complete circle roughly forty metres across. Today, only one section of that perimeter remains standing, a double-faced wall three metres wide and still reaching 1.6 metres in height, the two outer skins of carefully laid stone sandwiching a rubble core in the manner typical of such construction.
The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a complete circular enclosure, which suggests it was still broadly intact at that point, or at least recognisable as such. By the time the third edition of the same map was produced in 1922, it had been partially levelled, most likely cleared to improve the grazing land around it. That roughly eighty-year window accounts for much of what was lost, though the surviving arc is substantial enough to give a real sense of the original structure's scale and construction quality.
