Ringfort (Cashel), Ballinchalla, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballinchalla, Co. Mayo

Sitting among the rock outcrops of Ballinchalla in County Mayo, this early medieval enclosure is the kind of site that a casual walker might cross without fully registering what lies underfoot.

What appears to be a low field boundary is, in fact, the remains of a cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, with a wall still standing roughly one and a half metres high and three metres wide, enclosing a roughly circular area of about thirty-two metres across.

The wall is of dump construction, meaning it was built by piling stones together without mortar, a technique common in the early medieval period when such enclosures served as farmsteads for a single family or small household. A gap of around two and a half metres on the north-east side marks what was likely the original entrance. The site sits in an area of natural rock outcrop, which would have made it both practical and defensible as a location. At some later point, a stone field fence was laid directly over the cashel wall, running from the south around to the north-east, which is part of why the earlier structure can be easy to miss. Centuries of agricultural use have quietly absorbed one layer of history into another.

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Pete F
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