Ringfort (Cashel), Keamsellagh, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Keamsellagh, Co. Galway

In the grassland of Keamsellagh, a slight rise in the ground conceals what was once a cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks.

Today it reads less as a monument than as a gentle irregularity in a working field, its circular wall long since grassed over and absorbed into the agricultural landscape that has grown up around and, in places, directly over it.

The cashel measures roughly 28.2 metres in diameter, a modest but not unusual size for this class of early medieval enclosure, which typically served as a defended farmstead for a single family or small kin group. What makes this example particularly difficult to read on the ground is the degree to which later land use has overlaid the original structure. A field boundary runs across the site from the east, continuing through the south and round to the south-west, effectively cutting through the old enclosure and treating its fabric as just another feature of the terrain. In the north-west quadrant of the interior, field-clearance rubble has been piled up, the kind of accumulated stone that generations of farmers removed from surrounding ground to make cultivation easier. McCaffrey noted the site in 1952, recording it among a sequence of comparable monuments in the area, but even then it was poorly preserved.

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