Castle in ruins — Report the wrong picture

What is recorded here

Caislean Beg stands on a Galway spur as a grassed mound hiding three wall fragments and a blocked gateway, reduced from a small square castle to a quarry for neighbour bricks. Neary wrote that two underground openings once lay in its centre, though no trace remains to prove whether they were cellars or passages. The missing stone reappears in local walls and road edges, carrying the castle into ordinary life instead of letting it disappear.

On a low spur in undulating grassland overlooking a stream to S. Known locally as 'Caislean Beg or Little Castle' (Neary 1914, 124, no. 1) and described as a 'small square castle … long a quarry, and only the foundation remains, 24 ft. [7.3m] square in plan, walls 4 ft. [1.2m] thick'. What survives is an indeterminate grassed-over mound of earth and stone in which fragmentary sections of three walls are visible. These comprise an E wall (L 5m, Wth >0.3m, H 2m max.) along with short sections of the adjoining N wall (L 1.3m, Wth 0.7m). At S end of the former is a blocked ope (Wth 1.6m), possibly a door or gateway. The S side of the ope is formed by a short separate wall fragment (S wall), running E-W (L 1.2m, Wth 0.7m, H 2.2m). Neary (ibid.) also mentions the 'openings of two Man-made underground passages … in the centre of the castle ruin', no trace of which is now visible: possibly cellars but unlikely to be Man-made underground passages. The above description is derived from the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Galway Vol. II - North Galway'. Compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra and Paul Gosling (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1999). Date of upload: 05 August 2010

Built as a small square castle, likely during the late medieval period, it is remembered locally as "Caislean Beg" or "Little Castle" and now exists as a foundation ruin, historically noted by Neary in 1914.

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