Ringfort (Cashel), Tooreen, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Tooreen, Co. Galway

What makes this site quietly disorienting is how thoroughly the living landscape has absorbed it.

A cashel, the stone-walled equivalent of an earthen ringfort, once enclosed a farmstead or high-status dwelling here on a low rise above rough Galway pastureland. Now its double walls have largely collapsed, and the field boundaries that later farmers laid down across the same ground cut through and over the ancient structure with complete indifference, as though the monument were simply another inconvenient feature to be managed.

The cashel is subcircular in plan, measuring around 27 metres east to west, and would originally have consisted of two concentric drystone walls separated by a berm, a flat strip of ground between the two circuits, varying from about 4.5 metres wide on the eastern side to 8 metres on the west. The inner wall survives to a height of only 0.4 to 0.5 metres in its better-preserved sections, between north-north-west and north-north-east; elsewhere both walls have fallen to the point of near-invisibility, particularly on the southern and south-south-western arc. The outer wall, originally about 2 metres wide, is in places buried entirely beneath later field walls, one of which runs from north-north-east to south-south-east directly over it, while another cuts through the whole monument from north-north-east to south. A further field wall abuts the outer face of the inner wall and then veers off to the north-west, slicing across the outer circuit altogether. The result is a palimpsest in stone, successive generations of land use written across one another in a way that makes the original enclosure genuinely difficult to read from ground level.

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