Ringfort (Cashel), Skehanagh, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Skehanagh, Co. Galway

In the flat grassland of Skehanagh, a laneway quietly cuts through the remains of a structure that was already old when the lane was made.

The cashel it bisects, a type of early medieval stone ringfort built without mortar, has been reduced to little more than a low ring of collapsed drystone walling, so thoroughly swallowed by blackthorn and bramble that its circular form is more something to be reasoned out than clearly seen.

The structure is roughly 21.4 metres in diameter, with a wall that was once perhaps an imposing enclosure boundary, now standing barely 0.6 metres on the interior face and just over a metre on the exterior. The wall's original width of 3.1 metres suggests something that was built with some solidity, even if what survives is a largely shapeless rubble spread. At the centre of the interior sits a field-clearance cairn, a mound of stones gathered from the surrounding land over generations of farming, which adds a layer of later agricultural history on top of the earlier one. The cashel sits on a south-east facing slope, slightly anomalous against the otherwise level ground around it, which may have been part of the original logic of its placement.

The site is heavily overgrown and the lane cutting through the south-east portion has further disrupted whatever boundaries once existed. Visitors should expect nothing easily legible; the value here is in knowing what the tangle of scrub actually contains, and in understanding how completely a substantial stone enclosure can dissolve back into a field over the course of a few centuries.

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Pete F
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