Ringfort (Cashel), Carrownamaddoo, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
A later field boundary runs straight through this early medieval enclosure in Carrownamaddoo, County Sligo, crossing the interior and meeting the ancient bank at two points, north-west and south.
It is the kind of collision that happens quietly across Irish farmland, where centuries of agricultural reorganisation gradually override what came before, leaving earlier structures half-absorbed into the working landscape.
The site is a cashel, a type of ringfort enclosed not by an earthen bank but by one built of stone, and this particular example sits on a gentle south-easterly slope in undulating pasture, elevated just enough to distinguish it from the surrounding ground. The circular enclosure measures about twenty metres in diameter, bounded by a rubble limestone bank roughly 2.3 metres wide and surviving to an internal height of around 0.6 metres. There is no fosse, the external ditch that commonly accompanies earthen ringforts, which is typical of stone-built examples where the material for the enclosing wall was gathered or quarried rather than dug from the ground beside it. The bank survives best along its southern to north-north-western arc. At its external base, between south and east-north-east, the stonework has been revetted with larger stone blocks, meaning the outer face was reinforced or faced to hold the structure together, and a corresponding internal revetment runs along the south-west to west-north-west section. No original entrance has been identified, the passage of time and the intervention of the later field wall having obscured whatever break or threshold once existed.