Ringfort (Cashel), Cashelduff, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cashelduff, Co. Mayo

At Cashelduff in County Mayo, a roughly circular enclosure sits on a rocky rise in stony pasture, and it has been so thoroughly absorbed into the surrounding agricultural landscape that it now stretches almost the full east-west width of a modern rectangular field.

Its walls are continuous with the field walls beside it, built in the same rough manner, from the same sized stones, making it easy to walk past without registering that you are looking at something far older than the farm that surrounds it.

The enclosure is classified as a possible cashel, a term for a ringfort constructed entirely from stone rather than earthen banks and ditches. The interior measures roughly 23 by 24 metres, and the existing drystone wall is narrow, between 0.6 and 1 metre wide, standing about 1 metre high on the interior face. What makes the structure more legible as something ancient is what lies beneath and beyond that wall: a broad, sod-covered plinth of stones projecting outward from the exterior edge, which may represent the remnant of an original enclosing wall or bank that was once around 2 metres wide. On the northern arc, this plinth meets a pronounced external scarp of around 1.6 metres, where it merges with the natural slope of the rise. The southern and south-eastern sections are more modest, marked by a low kerb of large stones. It is possible that field clearance over the centuries gradually buried and broadened the original structure, adding to its bulk without preserving its form. There is no identifiable original entrance; access now comes through a tumbled gap at the north-north-west. The interior surface is uneven and follows the natural contours of the rise, highest at the north and falling away toward the east and west, with a small rock outcrop breaking through at the centre. A conifer plantation now fills the interior, and a quarry pit some 8 to 10 metres across lies a short distance downslope to the north, a reminder that this landscape has been worked and reworked across many different periods.

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