Ringfort (Cashel), Caherduff, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
Beneath a pasture field in Caherduff, the ground has been shaped by human hands into a form that is still just about legible nearly two millennia after it was made.
What survives here is a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort built to enclose a farmstead or small settlement, and the arc of its perimeter wall continues to hold its shape: roughly 47 metres long, 1.2 metres high, and 2.3 metres thick, running from the west-south-west around to the north-north-west, its surface long since softened under a skin of sod.
By 1838, when the first Ordnance Survey mapping recorded the site, the cashel was shown intact, which gives a useful lower boundary for its survival in recognisable form. The interior has since been disturbed by digging, and much of what remains underfoot is karst, the fractured and dissolved limestone bedrock characteristic of this part of Mayo, a landscape where the rock pushes through the surface in shelves and hollows and makes the ground read differently from ordinary pasture. Tucked into the north-west of the site, adjoining the bank, is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage, now closed, that would originally have served as a concealed storage space or place of refuge for the people who lived within the enclosure. Souterrains are commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and their presence alongside a cashel wall is not unusual, though the combination here, set against exposed karst and documented in its intact state from the mid-nineteenth century, gives the site a particular density of layered time.