Ringfort (Cashel), Garraun Beg, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
A slight rise in the grassland of Garraun Beg is all that announces this early medieval enclosure, and even that requires a trained eye.
What survives is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone rather than an earthen boundary wall, its circular perimeter measuring roughly 33 metres across. The drystone wall that once marked that perimeter is now low and fragmentary, worn down to little more than a suggestion in the turf. A gap on the northern side may well be the original entrance, though the ground has had time enough to blur the distinction between deliberate design and simple decay.
Inside the enclosure, two low stone walls survive in partial form, one running roughly north to south, the other on a north-west to south-east alignment. These are thought to be internal divisions, the kind of partitioning that separated living quarters from animal pens, or one household function from another, within the tightly organised space of a cashel. More intriguing still is a spoon-shaped hollow visible in the western sector, approximately 11 metres long and oriented east to west. This may be the collapsed remnant of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that early medieval communities used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation of domestic structures. Such features are not uncommon in ringforts across Connacht, but their identification depends heavily on what the land surface chooses to reveal. Adding a further layer of interest to this small pocket of landscape, another ringfort sits just 100 metres to the north, suggesting that this part of Galway was once a reasonably settled and organised agricultural territory, its inhabitants living in close enough proximity to have been neighbours in any meaningful sense of the word.