Ringfort (Cashel), Coolcappagh, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A stone wall nearly four metres thick at its base, encircling a space not much wider than a tennis court, sitting quietly in a pasture field in County Limerick.
That combination of mass and modesty is what makes this cashel worth pausing over. A cashel is simply a ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, a form especially common in areas where loose limestone was easier to gather than timber was to fell. This one sits on a very slight south-facing slope near Coolcappagh, its circular enclosure measuring roughly 27.5 metres east to west and 26.6 metres north to south, the interior level and undisturbed.
Ringforts were typically built during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small community. The wall here, recorded and compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011, retains a vertical external face on the western side, though elsewhere it has slumped with age, its profile softening from an original height of over a metre and a half on the exterior down to just over a metre on the interior. The wall narrows from that substantial 4.15-metre base to around two metres at the top. Two gaps interrupt the circuit on the north side, one at the northwest measuring 2.5 metres across and a wider one at the north-northwest running to 5.1 metres, with a natural limestone outcrop separating the two. Whether these represent original entrances, later breaks, or points where the masonry simply gave way is not recorded.
The site sits in ordinary working pasture, which means access is a matter of courtesy rather than infrastructure. The wall is densely overgrown with briars, so anyone approaching closely should come prepared for that. The western arc is the most rewarding section to examine, being the stretch where the original vertical face of the stonework is still legible beneath the vegetation. The level interior, clear of obvious surface features, gives little away about what domestic life within the enclosure once looked like, but the sheer thickness of the surviving wall makes the scale of the original construction easy to read even from a distance.