Ringfort (Cashel), Tooreen More, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Tooreen More, Co. Cork

What survives at Tooreen More is not a complete enclosure but a curve, roughly fourteen metres of dry stone walling arcing across a natural rise in rough West Cork grazing land, punctuated by rock outcrop.

That partial arc is what remains of a cashel, the Irish term for a stone-built ringfort, which would once have enclosed a farmstead or small settlement. The wall itself is still substantial, standing around one and a half metres high and over a metre thick, which gives some sense of the effort that originally went into its construction.

What makes this particular site a little more complex than it might first appear is the arrangement around that surviving arc. Two conjoined subrectangular enclosures are attached to the external face of the wall, the smaller measuring roughly six metres by seven and a half, the larger around eight metres by ten. These outer enclosures were likely used for penning animals or for agricultural activity, a common feature of early medieval farmsteads in Ireland. More striking still is the presence of a souterrain in the interior. Souterrains are underground stone-lined passages, built during the early medieval period and used variously for storage, refuge, or both. Their construction required considerable skill, and their presence at a site is often taken as an indicator that whoever lived here had resources and a reason to protect them.

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