Ringfort (Cashel), Glengowla, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Glengowla, Co. Galway

At the southern end of a ridge in Glengowla, a stretch of collapsed drystone walling traces the outline of an early medieval settlement that has been slowly swallowed by the landscape around it.

What survives is a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort common in the west of Ireland, where timber was scarce and stone was not. Unlike the earthen raths found more widely across the country, cashels were built entirely from dry-laid stone, and their remains tend to survive as low, rubble-strewn arcs rather than the dramatic circular banks that appear elsewhere.

This particular cashel is roughly subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 35 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west. Its original boundary wall has largely collapsed, and much of the eastern, southern, and western circuit has been absorbed into a modern field wall built directly on top of it, a fate common to ancient enclosures in areas where farmers over the centuries simply found ready-made building material in whatever the ground offered. A gap in the north-western section appears to be a modern intrusion rather than an original entrance. The structure was recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, Vol. I, compiled by Paul Gosling and published in 1993, which remains a foundational reference for the early settlement archaeology of the region.

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