Ringfort (Rath), Farranablake, Co. Galway

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Farranablake, Co. Galway

In the rolling pastureland of Farranablake, a circular cashel sits quietly being absorbed by the landscape around it.

A cashel is a ringfort built from drystone walling rather than earthen banks, and this one measures roughly 45 metres across, a scale that would once have made it a substantial enclosed settlement. Today, much of that enclosing wall has collapsed, and in several places later field walls have simply been built on top of it, making the boundary between ancient monument and modern farmland genuinely difficult to read. Only the arc running from the west-northwest to the north-northwest gives any clear sense of the original structure.

What the site does retain, tucked into its southwest quadrant, is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind commonly associated with early medieval ringforts in Ireland, where they likely served as storage spaces or places of refuge. Meanwhile, the northeast quadrant of the interior has taken a more pragmatic turn, with a barn and a water tank now occupying ground that would once have sat within the cashel's protective enclosure. The result is a site layered with different eras of use, none of them especially visible at a glance, which is part of what makes it interesting.

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Pete F
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