Stone Circle, Caheravoley, Co. Galway

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Stone Circle, Caheravoley, Co. Galway

There is a stone circle at Caheravoley in County Galway that exists almost entirely on paper.

The site appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a slightly oval enclosure, roughly forty metres by thirty-five metres, but by the time the third edition was published in 1933 it had evidently disappeared, and today there is no visible trace of it whatsoever on the level, reclaimed pastureland where it once stood.

What makes the site particularly interesting is the tension between its official classification and what local people actually called it. Recorded formally as a stone circle, it was known in the area as a cashel, a term for a stone-walled enclosure, typically early medieval in origin, built to protect a farmstead or settlement. The two categories are not necessarily incompatible, and misidentification or reclassification of such sites is not unusual where physical evidence is ambiguous. Adding another layer of complexity, the enclosure apparently contained a limekiln at some point. A limekiln is a structure used to burn limestone to produce quicklime, commonly for agricultural use in improving acidic soils, and their presence inside or near older enclosures often signals a period of later, practical reuse of whatever stone was conveniently at hand. It is entirely possible that the gradual dismantling of the enclosure's walls to feed or construct that kiln, combined with broader land reclamation work in the area, accounts for its complete disappearance from the landscape within a few decades of first being mapped.

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Pete F
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