Ringfort (Cashel), Cashlancran, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
In a field of recently cleared pasture near Cashlancran in County Mayo, a roughly oval enclosure sits in a state of quiet dilapidation, its significance easy to miss.
Measuring around 41 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, it is large enough to have once constituted a meaningful domestic space, yet what survives of its enclosing stone wall barely reaches 0.8 metres in height and 1.5 metres in width. The interior is heavily overgrown, and low stone walls run through it in patterns that suggest former subdivisions or structures, now smothered under vegetation.
This is a cashel, the term used for a ringfort, which was a farmstead type common across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period, enclosed by a stone rather than an earthen bank. The word cashel itself, preserved in the townland name Cashlancran, is one of those cases where the place-name quietly announces what the archaeology has to offer. Ringforts of this kind were typically the enclosed homesteads of farming families, sometimes housing people and livestock together within a single defended perimeter. The poor condition of the walls at Cashlancran, and the vegetation that has reclaimed the interior, makes it harder to read than better-preserved examples, but the basic form, an oval stone enclosure with internal divisions, is legible enough to understand what once stood here.