Ringfort (Cashel), Corskeagh, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Corskeagh, Co. Sligo

On the upper slopes of the Ox Mountains in County Sligo, a small oval enclosure sits on a plateau with a cliff face dropping away to the south.

It is a cashel, which is to say a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, and what survives here is modest but legible: a drystone wall, nearly three metres wide in places, tracing an oval roughly eighteen and a half metres across its longest axis. The wall has weathered badly on the western side, though internal kerbing is still identifiable there, and it holds its shape best to the north-east and east, where the masonry still stands between forty centimetres and seventy centimetres high on the interior.

The site carries a few details that reward close attention. Inside the enclosure, projecting from the inner face of the wall at the north-west, is a slightly raised circular area about five metres in diameter, defined by a low scarp and a faint stony rise. Its original purpose is not recorded, but such features within cashels sometimes reflect internal structures, animal enclosures, or later additions. There are also two poorly defined gaps in the wall, one to the west and one to the south-east, which likely represent original entrances. Appended to the outer face of the wall at the south-west is a small pennannular structure, roughly three metres by two and a half, built from rougher stonework and probably a sheepfold added at a later date, indicating the site continued to serve a practical purpose long after its original use had lapsed. A short distance to the west, the remains of a second enclosure survive, suggesting this part of the Ox Mountains was once a more occupied landscape than its present remoteness implies.

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Pete F
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