Ringfort (Cashel), Bunduff, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Bunduff, Co. Sligo

At the top of a small hillock in Bunduff, County Sligo, a roughly circular ring of stone sits in a clearing of rough pasture, just north of a coniferous plantation.

It is about twenty-three metres across, its enclosing bank running to four metres wide, though rising only about half a metre above the interior ground level. No ditch, or fosse, is detectable at ground level, and no original entrance can be made out. The structure is a cashel, the term used for a ringfort built from stone rather than earth, a form of enclosed settlement common across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century.

What gives this particular cashel a quietly unsettling quality is a depression about a metre deep sitting at the centre of its interior. This hollow is thought to represent a collapsed souterrain, an underground passage or chamber, typically constructed from stone, that was built beneath or adjacent to ringforts and used for storage or, in times of threat, concealment. Souterrains were often connected to the main dwelling within the enclosure, and their collapse, once the roof lintels give way and the fill shifts downward, leaves precisely the kind of subtle surface dip visible here. The entrance to the cashel itself has been lost entirely, erased by centuries of weathering and the gradual slumping of the bank, leaving a structure that reads as almost complete in outline but stripped of its original logic of access and movement.

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Pete F
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