Ringfort (Cashel), Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

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Ringfort (Cashel), Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

Somewhere in the pastureland of south County Limerick, a circular stone enclosure sits quietly in the middle of what was once described, without much modesty, as the remains of an ancient city of great extent.

That description comes from Dowd, writing in 1896, and while the language is Victorian in its enthusiasm, the underlying observation is not entirely wrong. The ringfort, a cashel, sits within a broader field system and is surrounded by earthworks that archaeologists now interpret as the remnants of a deserted medieval settlement, the kind of ghost landscape that turns up in aerial photographs far more readily than it does underfoot.

A cashel is a ringfort defined by stone rather than earthen banks, and this one has stone banks enclosing an interior roughly 25 metres across, as measured by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and John Hunt, who identified and documented it in their 1942 aerial survey of the area. They recorded it as Fort 2 in their annotated key, noting its circular profile from the air. The site sits on what was the former deer park of the Cahir Guillamore demesne, about 225 metres west of the townland boundary with Rockbarton. Curiously, despite its size and the scale of the surrounding earthworks, it does not appear on the Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, though it does show up on the OSi 5k mapping as a roughly circular enclosure of around 31 metres in diameter. Whether that discrepancy reflects the surveying priorities of an earlier era or simple oversight is not recorded.

The site sits in working pasture, so access will depend on the landowner and the season. It is most legible from aerial imagery, where the concentric earthworks and the enclosure at their centre are clearly visible, as confirmed by orthoimages captured between 2005 and 2020. Anyone approaching on foot should look for the raised stone banks that define the cashel itself and be aware that the surrounding earthworks, the putative settlement remains, are easy to overlook at ground level. The broader field system of which this forms the southern portion is registered separately, and this monument exists within a cluster of related features that together suggest a much more substantial human presence here than the current empty fields would suggest.

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