Ringfort (Cashel), Cashels, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cashels, Co. Mayo

A field fence runs straight through the middle of what was once, in all likelihood, a cashel, an early medieval enclosure built from dry-stone walling rather than the earthen banks more commonly associated with ringforts.

The fence divides the monument so cleanly that one half has been almost entirely levelled, its presence now betrayed only by a barely perceptible ripple in the pasture grass. The other half survives a little better, a low, partly sod-covered stony rise curving around a semi-circular interior choked with blackthorn scrub, the wall remnants measuring roughly three and a half metres wide but standing no more than half a metre above the surrounding ground on the outer face.

What makes this site particularly curious is its absence from the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard cartographic record against which Irish field monuments are routinely checked. Those maps, produced from the 1830s onwards, captured an enormous range of earthworks, enclosures, and ruins across the Irish countryside, so a feature not appearing on any edition of them is either a very inconspicuous survival or one that had already been reduced to near-invisibility by the time surveyors passed through. The enclosure sits on a slight rise in gently undulating terrain in the townland of Cashels, Co. Mayo, a place-name that itself derives from the Irish word for a stone fort. Approximately 190 metres to the north lies a separate rath, the term for an earthen-banked ringfort, suggesting this was once a landscape with more than one focus of early settlement activity.

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Pete F
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