Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyturin, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
In the undulating farmland of Ballyturin in County Galway, there is a place that has been slowly erasing itself from the landscape for the better part of a century.
What was once a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone or earth and stone boundary wall rather than a simple earthen bank, now leaves no visible trace on the surface. The ground gives nothing away.
The site has a quietly melancholy documentary history. The first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 records it as a circular hachured enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter, the cartographers' conventional shorthand for a raised or banked feature. By the 1921 edition, that same circle had been reimagined as an unenclosed mixed tree plantation, wider now at around 52 metres, the original structure presumably subsumed beneath roots and shade. In the early 1960s, someone still recognised enough on the ground to describe an earth and stone boundary and to note, at the centre of the interior, a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlements in Ireland and used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation. That souterrain has its own record number, suggesting it was considered a distinct feature worth cataloguing separately. Since then, the trees have been cleared, and with them, apparently, went the last legible signs of the cashel itself. Nothing of it now survives above ground.