Ringfort (Cashel), Drumminalough, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Drumminalough, Co. Galway

On the northern face of a low hill at Drumminalough, there is a circular enclosure that most people would walk past without a second glance.

What survives of this early medieval cashel, a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, is now little more than a low, grassed-over ridge of rubble tracing a rough circle roughly 29 metres across. Dense overgrowth smothers much of what remains, and a modern field wall has been laid directly across the north-western arc, folding the ancient boundary into the more recent geometry of agricultural land division.

The eastern portion of the cashel wall is gone entirely, cleared away at some point during field improvement works when stones were gathered and removed to make the land more workable. This kind of loss is common across the Irish midlands and west, where early enclosures built to define a family's farmstead and provide security for livestock gradually became sources of convenient building material. A cashel, unlike an earthen rath, announced its boundary in dry-stone construction, and that very solidity made it vulnerable once the social order that had built and maintained it had dissolved. What remains at Drumminalough is, in the understated language of archaeology, very poorly preserved, which is itself a kind of information, a record of all the pressures, practical and incremental, that have worked against survival over more than a millennium.

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