Ringfort (Cashel), Fawnarevagh, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Fawnarevagh, Co. Galway

In the rough grazing land of Fawnarevagh, a modern field wall runs straight through the middle of a structure that is roughly fifteen centuries older than itself.

The casualness of that intrusion says something about how Ireland's early medieval past sits within its working landscape, neither museumified nor entirely forgotten, simply present and in the way.

The site is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a drystone enclosure wall rather than the earthen banks more common in lower-lying parts of the country. Cashels tend to appear in stonier, western terrain where earth was scarce and rock was not. This one is roughly circular, with a diameter of around 47 metres, and its defining wall survives poorly, broken not only by the intrusive field boundary but by time and the general indifference of agricultural use. McCaffrey, recording the site in 1952, catalogued it among dozens of similar monuments in the region. What gives the location a quiet extra dimension is the proximity of a second cashel, recorded separately, lying approximately 50 metres to the south-west. Paired or clustered cashels are not unheard of in the west of Ireland, and their relationship, whether familial, functional, or simply the result of different generations settling the same patch of ground, is rarely easy to determine from surface evidence alone.

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