Ringfort (Cashel), Carrownacroagh, Co. Galway

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Ringfort (Cashel), Carrownacroagh, Co. Galway

What survives at Carrownacroagh is less a monument than an argument for one.

Spread across level grassland in north County Galway, this early medieval cashel, a type of ringfort enclosed by a drystone rather than earthen wall, has been worn down to the point where only a portion of its perimeter remains legible on the ground. The rest has to be inferred.

The cashel originally formed a rough oval, running approximately forty metres north to south and thirty metres east to west, which would have made it a reasonably substantial enclosure in its day. Drystone walling still traces the arc from the eastern side, around through the south, and on to the north-west, but two later field walls have cut directly across the monument at its north-west and north-east edges, interrupting whatever coherence the structure once had. The northern portion of the enclosing wall has vanished entirely at ground level, and the only evidence that it ever existed is a faint curving line in the vegetation, the kind of subtle differential growth that can betray buried stonework beneath, and which was picked up on aerial photography rather than by walking the site. That a significant part of the enclosure is now visible only from the air, as a ghost in the grass, says something about how thoroughly this place has been absorbed back into the working landscape around it.

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