Cashel, Rusheens, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a rise in the hilly pasture of Rusheens in County Mayo, a roughly circular enclosure sits quietly absorbed into the working landscape around it.
A cashel is a type of early medieval stone enclosure, typically a ringfort built with dry-laid stone walls, and this one measures just under forty metres across. Its defining feature is a stony scarp, the original enclosing bank, still standing around a metre high on its north side and closer to one and a half metres on the south. Over the centuries, the farmers who worked this land have folded the old structure into their own field system, piling clearance stones and boulders along the top of the scarp and running newer walls across and around it. Blackthorn bushes have crept in along the perimeter, and at the north-northeast a stretch of rougher, more recent drystone walling has been added, patching the ancient fabric with something more practical.
The site appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1838 and 1919 under the name Cashel, which suggests it was already understood locally as an antiquity by the time the first surveyors passed through. Inside the enclosure, a later field wall runs from roughly north-northeast to south-southwest across the interior, and its line corresponds with a subtle shift in ground level; the eastern half of the interior sits a little lower and tilts gently down toward the southeast. It is the kind of detail easily missed underfoot, but it hints at earlier modification or use of the ground inside. A second ring wall, set two to four metres in from the top of the scarp, encircles the interior and has two gaps, a wider one at the southwest and a narrower one at the northeast, through which the enclosed grassy centre can be reached. The whole perimeter is edged with blackthorn, hawthorn, and hazel, giving the structure a quietly bounded quality even as it blends into the surrounding pasture.