Ringfort (Cashel), Killeeneen Beg, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a small hill in County Galway called Knockaunalaghta, there is almost nothing left to see.
The pastureland rolls on as it always has, and the ground gives nothing away to the casual observer. Yet the faint outline of something older persists, visible not to the eye standing in the field but to the aerial camera, a ghostly impression preserved in an overhead photograph where centuries of farming have failed to erase it entirely.
What once stood here was recorded in 1952 by McCaffrey as a probable stone fort, described at that point as a surviving segment of earthen and stone wall roughly nine metres long. The site is classified as a possible cashel, a term for a stone-walled ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead built throughout early medieval Ireland to protect a family's household and livestock. An earlier reference by Redington in 1916 also noted the location. By the time modern surveyors came to assess it, even that modest wall fragment had disappeared from the surface entirely, leaving only the aerial trace as evidence that something was once deliberately built on this low hilltop in Killeeneen Beg.