Ringfort (Cashel), Turloughkeeloge, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Turloughkeeloge, Co. Galway

In the rolling farmland of Turloughkeeloge, a later field wall runs across ground that was already old when it was built, quietly burying the evidence beneath it.

What lies underneath is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a drystone enclosing wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one has been so thoroughly absorbed into the working landscape that its circular outline is now only just legible.

The cashel measures roughly 30 metres in diameter, with the collapsed drystone wall still traceable at nearly four metres wide in places, though it rises no more than 0.6 metres above the surrounding ground. Cashels of this kind were typically constructed during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. The wall here has long since fallen in on itself and become overgrown, and a later agricultural field wall has been laid directly over it, which has both protected portions of the original fabric and made the whole thing considerably harder to read. The surrounding land is undulating pasture and tillage, the kind of terrain that has seen continuous farming use across many centuries, and the cashel's gradual disappearance into that landscape feels less like neglect than like simple accumulation of time.

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