Ringfort (Cashel), Derryronan, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Derryronan, Co. Mayo

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.

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Pete F
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