Ringfort (Cashel), Saintclerans, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Saintclerans, Co. Galway

On the former grounds of Saintclerans demesne in County Galway, a large circular cashel sits quietly in reclaimed pastureland, its presence more suggested than announced.

A cashel is a stone ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland using dry-laid stone rather than earthen banks, and this one measures a considerable 35.5 metres in diameter. What makes it quietly strange is how thoroughly the land has moved on around it: the structure, once a working enclosure that would have sheltered a household and its livestock, has been so thoroughly absorbed into the agricultural landscape that most of it survives only as a low, grassed-over stony bank. A silage pit now abuts the wall on its eastern side, the ordinary business of modern farming pressing up against a structure that is likely well over a thousand years old.

The best-preserved section of the drystone wall stands at the northern arc, where the coursed stone is still legible as deliberate construction. Elsewhere, the wall has subsided and grassed over to the point where it reads more as a gentle rise in the field than an archaeological feature. The site lies within land that was once part of the Saintclerans demesne, the estate historically associated with the Persses and later with the filmmaker John Huston, who leased and restored the house during the mid-twentieth century. The cashel, of course, predates any of that by many centuries, and McCaffrey noted the site as early as 1952.

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