Ringfort (Cashel), Gortroe, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
A circular cashel sits on a prominent hillock in the pastureland of Gortroe, Co. Galway, though calling it a cashel at this point requires a degree of imagination.
A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this example, roughly 37.8 metres in diameter, was already in poor condition when archaeologists first examined it in 1983. By the time they returned nine years later, most of what remained had been levelled. What survives is a section of drystone wall preserved almost by accident beneath a later field boundary running from the south-west to the north-west, and elsewhere only a faint scarp in the ground traces the wall's original line.
The site was first noted in print by McCaffrey in 1952, catalogued among the monuments of the region. When surveyors visited in May 1983, they recorded the drystone wall and observed what appeared to be a souterrain in the north-east quadrant of the interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval ringforts and thought to have served for storage or as a refuge. By 1992 the picture had changed considerably: the monument had been largely levelled, with only the field-wall section and that barely perceptible scarp left to indicate what had stood there. The hillock itself remains, rising from the surrounding pasture, but the structure that once crowned it has almost entirely disappeared into the landscape.