Shrule Abbey
Shrule Abbey is a ringforts and site in the countryside 5.6 km north of Headford, County Galway. St. Colman's Church is within 180 m.
- From Headford
- 5.6 km north
The map does not yet record a phone number, a website or opening hours for Shrule Abbey. Anyone can add them on OpenStreetMap; this page picks the change up at the next refresh.
Getting to Shrule Abbey
- From the town
- 5.6 km north of the centre in a straight line; it is out in the country, so allow for the roads.
- Directions from where you are
- Open the model above, tap the pin and choose “Directions here”; the route is drawn from your own position.
Around it
Other sites within 3 km: Shrule Castle (346 m), Lisglennatober (1.0 km), Lough Lee (1.4 km), Loughlee Well (1.5 km) and Cahernaman Fort (1.6 km).
What a ringfort is
The countryside around Tuam is dotted with ringforts, and there is nothing unusual in that: Ireland has more than 40,000 of them on record and probably had 50,000 once, about one in every two square kilometres, though ploughing and building have flattened many. They are small round enclosures, some of stone, most of banked earth with a ditch outside and once a wooden palisade on top, built from the Bronze Age through to about the year 1000 as the fenced yards of farmsteads. One or more houses stood inside.
The Irish names tell you what kind you are looking at. A ráth is the earthen bank, a lios the open space it encloses, so a place beginning Lis- or Rath- was an earthen fort; cathair, anglicised caher, is a stone-walled one; dún is a stronghold of some standing and need not be round at all. Many of the sites below survived because they were left alone as fairy forts, and many more were found on the first Ordnance Survey maps, from the air, or in the digging that comes before a new road.
Written from Wikipedia, "Ringfort" (CC BY-SA 4.0); the words are ours.
Within a short walk
- St. Colman's Church180 mHistoric churches
Other ringforts and sites around Headford
- 1.0 km
- 1.6 km
- 1.7 km
- 1.7 km
- 1.9 km
- 2.0 km
- 2.0 km
- 2.2 km
Questions people ask
Where is Shrule Abbey?
Are there other ringforts and sites nearby?
Source record: OpenStreetMap way/1138047776, read on 2026-09-18. The street is the mapped address where there is one, otherwise the nearest named road. Distances are straight lines.