Ringfort (Cashel), Killeeneen Beg, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In the pastureland of Killeeneen Beg, there is a stone fort that no longer announces itself in any way.
The ground is flat and grassed, and nothing breaks the surface to suggest that an oval enclosure once stood here, its walls wide enough to walk along and built in a manner that spoke of some deliberate, careful construction. It is, by any practical measure, gone; and yet it remains a recorded place, a site with dimensions and a description, because people came and looked before the last of it vanished.
The site belongs to a category of early medieval enclosure known in Irish as a cashel or caher, a stone-walled ringfort typically associated with farming settlements of the early Christian period. When Redington noted it in 1916, he described the foundations of a small caher lying just across a bohereen, a narrow rural lane, immediately to the west of a second cashel that still survives nearby. By 1952, when McCaffrey examined it more closely, the enclosure could be measured as an oval roughly 28 metres by 17 metres across. The wall, where it remained, was about 1.8 metres wide and had dropped to just 0.3 metres in height. On the northern side it retained two faces of blocks set on edge, the characteristic double-skin construction of a dry-stone cashel wall; elsewhere only a single face of stonework was still legible. Even then, McCaffrey called it extremely ruinous. In the decades since, whatever remained above ground has disappeared entirely into the pasture.
What makes this particular site quietly interesting is less what it was than the fact that it sat in a pair with its neighbour, two cashels positioned either side of a lane in the same small townland. That pairing, unusual in itself, is now only half-visible; one survives, the other has been absorbed back into the field.