Ringfort (Cashel), Kilshanvy, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Kilshanvy, Co. Galway

On a slight rise in the rolling grassland of north Galway, a stretch of drystone walling curves through the turf, tracing the ghost of an enclosure that once defined somebody's world.

Only part of the circuit survives above ground; from north through east to southwest the wall still reads in the landscape, but elsewhere nothing shows at the surface. A later field wall has been laid directly over the northern to north-eastern section, one era of land management quietly cannibalising another.

The site is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks and ditches, generally dating to the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. This one is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 42.5 metres north to south and 38.8 metres east to west, making it a fairly modest enclosure. A gap on the east-south-east side may be the original entrance, though it is impossible to say so with certainty given the overall state of preservation. Inside, two low grassed-over structures survive: one is circular, about 2.7 metres in diameter, and the other is subrectangular, around 3.4 metres long and 2 metres wide. These are likely the collapsed remains of small stone houses, the kind of modest domestic buildings that would have sheltered an early medieval farming household and perhaps their animals. Together the interior structures and the enclosing wall suggest a self-contained farmstead, unremarkable by the standards of its time, but quietly legible even now across the centuries.

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Pete F
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