Ringfort (Cashel), Parkbaun, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Parkbaun, Co. Galway

A low hillock in the rolling pastureland of Parkbaun, County Galway, holds the remains of a cashel, a type of early medieval ringfort built from dry-laid stone rather than earth.

From a distance, or even at close quarters, there is almost nothing to see. The circular enclosure, roughly 21 metres in diameter, survives only as a collapsed, grass-grown arc of drystone walling that traces the line from the north-east, around through the south, and on to the west. Beyond that arc, to the north-west, the ground offers no surface trace of the structure at all.

The reason for that gap is practical rather than mysterious. A field wall, built at some later point, cuts directly across the monument from north-east to west, and it is a reasonable assumption that stone from the original cashel was robbed out and repurposed when that boundary was constructed. This is a common fate for such sites across Ireland, where drystone ringforts provided a convenient quarry for generations of farmers laying out their land. The site was noted by McCaffrey in 1952, who listed it among the archaeological monuments of the area, but it has not fared especially well in the intervening decades.

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Pete F
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