Ringfort (Cashel), Rindifin, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
A hay barn now occupies the interior of what was once a cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, at Rindifin in County Galway.
All that remains visible above ground is a single arc of drystone wall curving from the south-east, around through the south, and continuing to the west. The rest has been absorbed into the working landscape, with a gravel pit sitting just outside the former enclosing wall on the southern and western sides.
When surveyors recorded this site for the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, they noted an oval enclosure measuring approximately 25 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south. That record, made nearly two centuries ago, is now the clearest picture we have of the cashel's original extent. The site sits roughly 130 metres to the west-south-west of a second cashel, which itself survives nearby, making this a small cluster of early medieval enclosures in close proximity. Cashels of this kind were typically the enclosed farmsteads of fairly prosperous farming families during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and stone-built examples like this one are particularly associated with the west of Ireland, where field stone was plentiful and timber less so. The proximity of two such enclosures within such a short distance of each other hints at a settled, organised landscape here long before the modern field patterns took hold.