Ringfort (Cashel), Castlebarnagh, Co. Mayo

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Ringfort (Cashel), Castlebarnagh, Co. Mayo

A stone enclosure large enough to encompass most suburban back gardens sits on a ridge in Castlebarnagh, Co. Mayo, commanding views in every direction.

Known as Cashelmore, a name that appears on Ordnance Survey maps from as early as 1838, this is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks and ditches. The roughly circular interior measures just over 44 metres north to south and 43 metres east to west, enclosed by a drystone wall of limestone blocks and boulders, with the largest stones laid in the lowest courses and along the outer face.

The wall survives best on the western half of the cashel, where it reaches up to 3.4 metres in width and nearly 2 metres in height at the south-west. The eastern half has fared less well, with sections slumped into broad, sod-covered spreads of loose stone. The entrance passage at the north-north-west is the most architecturally distinctive feature: flanked by massive horizontally laid slabs, it narrows slightly from exterior to interior, and a 2.1-metre roof lintel covers its outermost section. The landowner placed it there, though it is said to be an original slab. Equally intriguing is a large horizontal slab set into the collapsed inner face at the south-south-east, which overlies a cavity that may represent the remains of a mural chamber or passage, a small room or corridor built within the thickness of the wall itself. A large slab projecting from the outer wall face nearby may be part of the same structure. Beneath the western interior lies a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind frequently found within Irish cashels, likely used for storage or refuge. Two piles of clearance stones in the interior suggest the enclosure has seen agricultural use in the centuries since it was built, and a later drystone field wall cuts across the interior on a roughly north-south axis, a reminder that the site was absorbed into the working landscape long after whatever community first raised its walls had gone.

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