Ringfort, Cregg, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Cregg, Co. Galway

In the undulating pastureland of Cregg in County Galway, a modern field wall cuts straight across the western edge of a structure far older than itself, indifferent to what it overlies.

That older structure is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from drystone rather than earthen banks, and what remains of it has collapsed to the point where the boundary between ancient monument and ordinary farmland is easy to miss entirely.

The cashel is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 25 metres across on its west-northwest to east-southeast axis and just over 22 metres on the perpendicular. Those dimensions suggest a reasonably substantial enclosure in its time, likely dating from the early medieval period, when cashels of this kind served as defended farmsteads for local farming families of some modest status. The drystone wall that once defined its circuit has largely fallen, and the western arc is further obscured by the later field wall built over it. Within the interior sits a clochán-beehive structure, a corbelled stone building of a type associated with early Christian monastic and rural settlement in the west of Ireland, recorded separately in the Sites and Monuments Register.

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Pete F
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