Ringfort (Cashel), Kilbeacanty, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Kilbeacanty, Co. Galway

In the level farmland of Kilbeacanty in County Galway, modern field walls cross directly over an early medieval monument as though it were simply another inconvenience in the landscape.

The structure beneath them is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from drystone walling rather than earthen banks, and it has been quietly losing ground to encroaching agriculture and overgrowth for some considerable time.

The cashel is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 29 metres across its widest axis and 25 metres north to south. Its defining drystone wall is largely obscured by vegetation, and along much of its circuit, later field boundaries have been laid directly on top of the monument, causing significant collapse to the south and west in particular. What makes the site more than a simple ruin, however, is the presence of a souterrain within the western interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both. Their construction implies a degree of organised effort that speaks to the original inhabitants, likely farmers of some standing in the early centuries of the first millennium AD, for whom this raised ground in the plain represented both a home and a defensible enclosure.

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