Ringfort (Cashel), Crockacullion, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Crockacullion, Co. Sligo

Tucked into the lower slopes of the Ox Mountains in County Sligo, this cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, has been quietly repurposed and reoccupied across several centuries without anyone apparently thinking twice about it.

What makes the site unusual is not simply its age but the layers of subsequent use that have been folded into it: a townland boundary wall cuts straight through the interior on a north-south axis, crossing both the inner and outer enclosures as though the ancient structure were simply an inconvenience to be bisected. The western arc of the inner cashel wall was incorporated into a property boundary at some point, which also accounts for why that section was partially rebuilt and now rises to an unusually tall two metres above an interior terrace. The heather and fern-covered outer wall, meanwhile, has been absorbed into a field boundary along its southern stretch.

The cashel itself is a substantial construction: a roughly circular enclosure about 25 to 26 metres across internally, ringed by a drystone wall four metres wide with stone-faced inner and outer surfaces packed with a rubble core. A second enclosing wall sits about ten metres beyond the first, and it is in the space between these two walls, at the south-south-east, that the site becomes particularly layered. Two ruined gable-ended houses, built sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, occupy that annular gap, along with what appear to be small field divisions associated with them. Whoever built those houses was, in effect, sheltering within the outer ring of a structure already perhaps a thousand years old, using its walls as ready-cut stone and windbreak in one. There is also a small niche built into the thickness of the inner wall at the east-north-east, accessible through a low opening barely forty centimetres high, its original function unrecorded.

The site sits on a broad, undulating shelf of ground on the north-facing slopes of the Ox Mountains, with the immediate surroundings still covered in heather and interrupted by rock outcrops. Coniferous plantations press in from the east and west. Much of the outer wall is now little more than a low rubble mound, and collapsed stonework obscures the outer face of the inner wall for much of its circuit, so some patience is needed to read the full plan of the place on the ground.

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