Ringfort (Cashel), Derryronan, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
What makes this particular enclosure in Derryronan quietly compelling is not any single dramatic feature but the accumulated layering of different periods of use, all visible at once in a field of pasture grass.
The cashel, a type of ringfort defined by stone rather than earthen defences, sits on a low rise measuring 31 metres across in both directions. Its original stone wall has been reduced in most places to a low, intermittently faced bank, but at the north-east and east enough survives to two or three courses to give a clear sense of what once stood here. Elsewhere, the structure has been absorbed wholesale into a later field wall, the kind of pragmatic recycling that happened across Ireland whenever useful stone was near to hand and a boundary needed building.
The defensive logic of the site is still readable on the ground. Around the base of the earthen scarp runs a fosse, a rock-cut or dug ditch intended to make the enclosure harder to approach, here roughly four metres wide, though a section to the south-west has been filled in with field clearance stones over the years. Beyond the fosse, a low outer bank survives at the north and north-east, though it has been levelled elsewhere. The most likely original entrance was to the east-south-east, where a gap about 1.8 metres wide is flanked on one side by large stone blocks and leads onto a rough causeway crossing the fosse. Inside, the ground slopes gently downward toward the west and south-west, and two features in the interior are worth noting. A linear depression running about eight metres from the north wall toward the centre may be the collapsed roof of a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with Irish ringforts and used for storage or refuge. More unusual is a strip of rough paving in the southern half of the interior, a band of large flat slabs two to three metres wide running from the centre southward toward a gap in the scarp, some slabs deeply set, others lying loose on the surface.
The site does not stand in isolation. A rath, the earthen equivalent of a cashel, lies around 200 metres to the west, another enclosure about 230 metres to the south-west, and a further rath is visible on a more prominent rise roughly 500 metres to the north. This density of early medieval settlement features across a relatively small area of County Mayo suggests the landscape here was once considerably more organised and inhabited than the current scattering of pasture and field walls might imply. A few hawthorn bushes now grow along the perimeter and in the interior, their presence a small reminder that these sites have long carried an association, in folk tradition, with boundaries between the everyday and something older.