Ringfort (Cashel), Bunduff, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Bunduff, Co. Sligo

In a hollow set into the undulating pasture outside Bunduff in County Sligo, something once stood that the Ordnance Survey cartographers never recorded.

Not on any edition of their six-inch maps, this site existed at the margins of official knowledge even before it disappeared entirely from the ground.

When it was recorded in 1991, what surveyors found was the partial remains of what appeared to be a cashel, a type of early medieval ringfort defined by a drystone enclosing wall rather than an earthen bank. The interior measured roughly twenty metres in diameter, and the wall itself was composed of large boulders, though heavily overgrown and partially ruined. There was no visible fosse, the defensive ditch that typically surrounds earthwork ringforts, and no identifiable entrance survived. The 1989 file cautiously described the area as "possibly circular", a note of uncertainty that now seems fitting, given that no physical trace of the monument remains visible at ground level today. Thirty metres to the north-east, a house and a tennis court occupy the landscape, mundane neighbours to what was, or may have been, a structure likely dating to the early Christian period in Ireland.

The site's absence from the OS maps suggests it was already obscured or misread by the time of the nineteenth-century surveys, and whatever remained in 1991 has since been swallowed entirely. It survives now only as a recorded coordinate, a boulder outline that briefly surfaced in the documentary record before vanishing again into the field.

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Pete F
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