Ringfort (Cashel), Clogher Beg, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Clogher Beg, Co. Sligo

What survives at Clogher Beg is not a dramatic monument but rather the ghost of one, a roughly circular platform of raised ground about thirty metres across where the bones of an early medieval enclosure are still just legible in the limestone rubble beneath the grass.

This type of site, a cashel, is a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks and ditches, and the distinction matters here because there is no fosse, no surrounding ditch, visible at ground level. What remains is the footings of a drystone wall, limestone rubble packed between two parallel rows of facing slabs, the whole thing now reduced to a low spread of stone no more than twenty centimetres high internally and about two metres wide at its base.

The wall circuit is incomplete in a revealing way. From the north-west around to the north-east, the footings disappear entirely, and in their place a straight east-west lane now marks the northern boundary of the site. Whether the lane obliterated the wall over time or was simply laid along the gap left by the original entrance is no longer clear; the entrance itself is not recognisable in the surviving fabric. The facing slabs that do remain are not continuous even where the wall does survive, and much of the circuit has collapsed into that low rubble bank, suggesting the upper courses were either robbed out for later building or simply tumbled and spread across the centuries. The site sits on a slight rise in rocky pasture, which would have given any original structure a modest natural advantage, though the surrounding landscape is gently undulating rather than commanding.

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