Ringfort (Cashel), Carroward, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
On the north-facing lower slopes of the Ox Mountains in County Sligo, a slightly raised circular patch of ground sits in hilly pasture, its outline half-buried in later field walls and never once recorded on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps.
That absence from the cartographic record is itself telling: a site that has existed, largely unremarked, beneath the working landscape for centuries, its original entrance no longer recognisable and its perimeter only partially legible.
What survives is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank. The roughly circular area measures approximately 23.5 metres in diameter, and along its south-east to south arc a stony rise, about 5.8 metres wide and 0.35 metres high on the interior, almost certainly preserves the footings of the original enclosing wall. Elsewhere, later field boundaries have absorbed or obscured the perimeter, which is a common fate for monuments of this kind in areas of continuous agricultural use. Inside the enclosure there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and most likely serving the original occupants as a place of storage or refuge. The combination of a stone-walled enclosure and an attached souterrain points to early medieval activity, though the precise dating of this particular site is not established.