Look more closely, however, and the wall is actually sitting on top of something much older: the remnants of a cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort built from drystone walling, which has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape of this Connemara valley.

The cashel is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 23.7 metres north to south and 19.9 metres east to west, dimensions that would once have enclosed a substantial homestead or farmstead of the early medieval period. Cashels of this kind, typically dating from somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries, were built by enclosing a living and working space within a thick stone wall, in contrast to the earthen banks of a rath or earthwork ringfort more common in lowland areas. At Na Grigíneacha, the original wall survives only as low traces, its stone long since repurposed or built over, so that the outline of the earlier structure is now visible mainly in the slight rise of the ground and the alignment of the field boundary that replaced it. The site sits just to the north of the Joyce River, in a valley whose Irish name, Gleann an Mháma, refers to a mountain pass, suggesting a location that would once have commanded a meaningful route through the landscape.