Ringfort (Cashel), Streamstown, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a rocky knoll at the southern tip of a ridge above Streamstown Bay in Co. Galway, a small stone enclosure has been slowly dissolving back into the landscape for centuries.
What remains is a cashel, a type of early medieval ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and this one measures roughly 18.5 metres north to south and 17.2 metres east to west. Its enclosing wall has been reduced to a low, grassed-over rubble bank, rarely more than 40 centimetres high, with no clear facing stones surviving on either its inner or outer sides. The stone has not simply weathered away; it was almost certainly taken deliberately, robbed out over generations to build the ruined farmhouses, field walls, and tracks that still dot the ground to the south-east.
Despite its degraded condition, the site retains enough detail to suggest how it once functioned. A rock-cut fosse, a defensive ditch carved through the bedrock rather than simply dug through soil, runs around roughly a third of the eastern side. Its base sits about 2.5 metres below the cashel interior and 1.5 metres below the ridge itself, which would have given the eastern approach a significantly steeper and more forbidding profile to anyone approaching from that direction. A partially curving entranceway, around 2.2 metres wide, opens at the north, though its base has been narrowed by a later stretch of walling. Inside, the eastern half of the enclosure sits noticeably lower than the western half, and faint traces of wall-footings along with an oval depression roughly 3 metres by 2 metres hint at structures that once stood within. The scholar George Petrie noted two cashels in this general area in his 1972 publication, and it is possible this is one of them, though the identification remains uncertain. Two related monuments lie close by: another cashel about 360 metres to the south-west, and a rath, an earthen ringfort, around 235 metres to the east.
