Ringfort (Cashel), Coolnaha, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Coolnaha, Co. Mayo

Between the third fairway and the rough, a prehistoric enclosure quietly holds its ground on the Ballyhaunis Golf Course in County Mayo.

The site is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone enclosing wall rather than an earthen bank, and it sits on a low rise in undulating terrain, offering open views south-west across a landscape of mixed pasture and bog. That a structure of this age occupies the same ground as bunkers and greens is striking enough, but what makes it stranger still is how thoroughly it has retreated beneath its own surface.

The cashel does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, which suggests it was either too degraded to record or simply overlooked by the surveyors. By the 1916 edition, it had been noted as a circular enclosure measuring somewhere between 45 and 50 metres in diameter, marked with a single ring of hachures and named as a cashel. Today the visible remains form a raised circular platform roughly 40 to 45 metres across, but the surface is buried under a densely matted carpet of scutch grass more than 40 centimetres deep. No enclosing wall is visible, and there is no surface trace of the souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind frequently associated with early medieval ringforts, which local knowledge places somewhere within the interior. The thick grass has built up into uneven hummocks, with narrow trenches or tunnels running through it, most likely rabbit runs rather than anything archaeological. A few hawthorn bushes mark the western perimeter, and a small gravelled road skirts the southern arc, with golf course fairways pressing in from the west and north.

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Pete F
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