Ringfort (Cashel), Keeloges, Co. Leitrim

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Keeloges, Co. Leitrim

Most early medieval ringforts sit on elevated ground, commanding the surrounding landscape.

The one at Keeloges, in County Leitrim's Glenade valley, does something slightly different: it occupies the top of a small hillock right on the valley floor, a choice that gives it an almost domestic quality, tucked into its surroundings rather than dominating them. A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone rather than an earthen boundary, and what survives here is a grass-covered spread of stone forming a roughly oval enclosure, measuring about 21.5 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west internally. Along its western side the remains are more pronounced, rising as a stone-faced scarp between 0.8 and 1.3 metres high, with a flat berm, a kind of narrow terrace, sitting just outside it and a slight outer bank or wall running for roughly 9 metres.

What makes this site quietly compelling is what may lie beneath and beside it. In the north-western part of the interior there is a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or as a refuge, its presence hinting at the more complex use of the enclosure than the low-lying grass suggests. To the east, there is a possible sweathouse, a small stone structure of the kind used historically in Ireland for therapeutic sweating, broadly comparable to a sauna, which were dotted across the northern and western counties in particular. Whether these features are directly contemporary with the cashel itself remains uncertain, but their proximity adds an unusual domestic and social texture to what might otherwise read as a simple agricultural enclosure.

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