Ringfort (Cashel), Cloonoghil, Co. Roscommon

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cloonoghil, Co. Roscommon

Something about the drystone wall enclosing this modest hillocky patch of County Roscommon suggests layers of purpose accumulated over centuries.

The structure visible today is a rebuilt wall, roughly one and a half metres high on its eastern side and nearly two metres wide, with noticeably larger stones laid at the base. That detail matters: the bigger stones at the bottom hint that the rebuilt wall may be sitting on top of something considerably older, possibly a cashel, which is a stone-walled ringfort of early medieval date, typically associated with a farming household or minor local lord.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 as a circular wooded enclosure with a diameter of around 35 metres, and is shown again, this time without tree cover, on the 1915 edition of the same map. The interior today is a subcircular grass-covered area measuring approximately 36.6 metres north-northeast to south-southwest and 33.3 metres west-northwest to east-southeast, set within an undulating landscape. That the woodland had cleared away between those two map editions is in itself a small piece of local history, suggesting either active clearance or a change in how the land was managed over the intervening decades. A second enclosure sits roughly 50 metres to the east, which raises the possibility that this corner of Cloonoghil once held a more complex arrangement of enclosed spaces than the single remaining structure suggests.

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Pete F
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