Ringfort (Cashel), Carrownamaddoo, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Carrownamaddoo, Co. Sligo

On a low rise in the quietly rolling pastureland of Carrownamaddoo in County Sligo, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits in a field with the kind of understatement that makes it easy to walk past and nearly impossible to date by eye.

What you are looking at is a cashel, a ringfort built not from earthen banks and ditches but from dry-stone walling, a construction method that gives these enclosures a solidity that has, in places, outlasted the intent of whoever built them.

This particular cashel encloses a circular area of about twenty-four metres in diameter. The wall, where it still stands, is impressive in its mass: roughly two metres thick, built with large un-coursed stone faces packed with smaller rubble fill between them, and reaching an external height of between 1.8 and 3 metres on its better-preserved stretches. The northern arc has fared less well, with both inner and outer faces having collapsed down to a low stone bank. The original entrance is set into the western side of the wall, a gap four metres wide, with single rows of large boulders running along either side of the approach like rough kerbing, extending four metres outward from the wall face. There is no fosse, the defensive ditch that typically rings an earthwork ringfort, which is characteristic of stone-built examples like this one. What makes the site feel particularly layered is the evidence of later land use pressing up against it: the footings of old field walls, running roughly north to south, abut the outer face of the cashel at the south-east and south-west corners, and another relic wall running north-west to south-east ties into the cashel wall on that side. These are the traces of an agricultural landscape that reused the ancient structure as a convenient boundary anchor, folding it into a pattern of fields that has since itself fallen out of use.

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Pete F
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