Ringfort (Cashel), Carrickoneilleen, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
A cashel is a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, and this one at Carrickoneilleen sits quietly within a natural ash wood on a south-facing hillside in County Sligo, its limestone rubble walls in various states of survival depending on which arc of the circuit you follow.
The enclosure is oval, roughly twenty metres east to west and eighteen metres north to south, and what makes it quietly unusual is the care its builders took with the ground itself. The interior was deliberately levelled and raised on the southern side to counteract the natural slope of the hillock, leaving the northern portion sitting lower than the ground outside the walls. That kind of earthworking, carried out before a single course of stone was laid, speaks to a purposeful, considered construction rather than a casual adaptation of the terrain.
The enclosing wall is built from random limestone rubble in a drystone technique, meaning no mortar, just carefully chosen and placed stone. At its best-preserved stretch, running from the south around to the northwest, both the inner and outer faces of the wall survive intact, standing between 1.3 and 1.5 metres on the interior side. Moving around to the northwest-to-northeast section, the inner face holds while the outer has collapsed outward. By the time you reach the arc from northeast back to south, only the footings remain. There is no fosse, the defensive ditch that often accompanies such sites, visible at ground level, and the original entrance has not been identified. Cashels of this type are generally associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when enclosed farmsteads were the dominant form of rural settlement across the country.