Ringfort (Cashel), Dromree, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Dromree, Co. Cork

In the pasture at Dromree, on a north-facing slope in mid-Cork, a roughly circular enclosure sits quietly collapsing back into the ground.

It measures about 27 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, enclosed by a stone wall that has largely fallen to a height of less than a metre, with the northern side shading into earthen bank rather than stone. This is a cashel, the term used for a ringfort whose enclosing boundary is built primarily of dry stone rather than earthen rampart, and it belongs to a class of monument that was once extraordinarily common across Ireland, typically serving as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period.

What gives this particular site a slightly unsettling quality is the layering of different lives compressed into the same ground. The interior is crossed by disused cultivation ridges running on a north-south axis, the faint corrugations left by lazy-bed farming, most likely from the post-medieval period or later, long after whoever originally built the cashel had gone. Beneath the south-western quadrant lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that was a standard feature of early medieval settlement, used variously for storage, refuge, or both. The original builders of the enclosure, the people who also dug and roofed that underground space, have left almost no other trace. Centuries later, someone else was growing crops inside the same walls, apparently indifferent to, or simply unaware of, what lay beneath the soil.

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Pete F
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