Ringfort (Cashel), Loughcurra, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Loughcurra, Co. Galway

In the rough pastureland of Loughcurra, Co. Galway, there is a place that exists almost entirely on paper.

A cashel, the term used for a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, once occupied this ground, its circular outline measuring roughly 22 metres across. Today, nothing of it can be seen at all.

The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records it clearly as a circular enclosure, a trace of early medieval rural life of the kind once scattered across almost every townland in Ireland. Cashels of this type typically served as enclosed farmsteads, their stone walls protecting a household, its animals, and its outbuildings. By the time the revised OS edition was produced in 1922, that circular form had already been redrawn as a small subrectangular field, the ancient outline absorbed and rationalised into the geometry of working farmland. Somewhere between those two surveys, the enclosure ceased to be legible on the ground, its stones presumably cleared, incorporated into field boundaries, or simply removed. No visible surface trace survives today.

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Pete F
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