Ringfort (Cashel), Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

For a time, this quietly ambiguous structure in County Limerick was officially recorded as a stone circle, appearing on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 as a circular arrangement of low upright stones.

By 1897, the same map series had downgraded it to a mere "Stone Circle (Site of)", and the 25-inch edition depicted it not as an antiquity at all, but as a tree-ring. What it most likely is, and probably always was beneath any later interference, is a cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland.

The 1840 Ordnance Survey Letters recorded a local description of some precision: a circular dry-stone wall of regular-sized limestone, about 90 metres in circumference and roughly 1.7 metres high, standing in Lord Gillamore's Deer Park in the townland of Caher. The account noted that the wall had "assumed its present form about 5 years ago", with some locals claiming it had been rebuilt using foundation stones from a nearby old castle, though others maintained that the lower courses had never moved. That nearby castle site lies about 215 metres to the north-east. The archaeologists Ó Ríordáin and Hunt, writing in 1942, examined the monument and concluded firmly that it was a stone-built fort rather than a stone circle, measuring approximately 23 metres in internal diameter. They also noted a long narrow depression inside the enclosure, which they thought might be a collapsed souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the type often associated with early medieval settlements. The surrounding landscape reinforces how layered this ground is: earthworks of a medieval village lie immediately to the north, east, and south; a medieval house site sits 70 metres to the west; and a historic road once passed about 105 metres to the north-west.

Today the monument survives as a roughly D-shaped area about 26 metres across, enclosed by the grass-covered footings of a low wall. The eastern side has been cut through by a field boundary that post-dates 1700, and there is no visible trace of the enclosing wall on the western side of that boundary. The site lies within the former demesne lands of Cahirguillamore House, about 900 metres to the south of the house itself. Aerial imagery from both 2005 to 2012 and September 2020 confirms what remains. Access to the interior of private demesne land should be checked in advance, and the monument itself is unobtrusive enough on the ground that knowing what to look for beforehand, particularly the low grassy wall-footings and the slight depression that may mark the souterrain, makes the visit considerably more rewarding.

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Pete F
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