Cashel House Hotel
Cashel
Connemara
Co. Galway
Ireland
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Cashel
The name of the townland and village of
Cashel or An Caiseal derives from the ancient cashel
or 'fort' in the graveyard north of the Church of St.
James, in the area known as High Cashel or Caiseal Ard.
This is a roughly circular bank of earth about 30 yards
in diameter, having a ditch on the outside and the traces
of rectangular buildings in the interior. Since it has
long been used as a burial ground and there is a famous
holy well, Tobar Chonaill, close by, it is likely that
this was an early Christian religious settlement.
 The
track running by the graveyard represents the old road
from the west, which kept a hundred feet or so higher
around Erris Beg and Cashel Hill than the present coast-hugging
road.
The most important antiquity on Cashel
Hill is a mile west of the graveyard, about eight hundred
yards up the hill from Sunset Cottage, and is known locally
as Altoir or Altoir Ula (an ula is a tomb or penitential
station ) and said to be a Mass Rock. It looks like a
low hut built out of a few massive and irregular stone
slabs, and whether or not Mass was ever read there in
Penal times it is in fact a megalithic tomb dating from
the end of the Stone Age or beginning of the Bronze Age,
about 3500-4000 years ago. This type of tomb is known
as a wedge-shaped gallery grave, and in this case the
narrowing of its chamber towards the rear or eastern
end is very striking when seen from higher up the hill.
The cap-stone forming its roof is about five feet square
and sixteen inches thick, and rests on smaller slabs
set edgeways in the ground to form the sides; outside
these slabs and parallel with them are other slabs, so
that the side walls are doubled. One of these outer slabs,
five feet high, stands forward of the main chamber and
represents the side of a sort of portico at the front
of the tomb. Originally the whole construction would
have been covered by a cairn, traces of which can be
seen around it. This is the only known megalithic tomb
in the South Connemara area.
Excerpt from "Mapping
South Connemara " with kind permission of Tim Robinson
(Folding
Landscapes ) who resides in Roundstone, Co. Galway. |
