Ringfort (Cashel), Farranyharpy, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
At the summit of Red Hill in County Sligo, somebody once built a stone enclosure with a wall nearly six metres thick and then tunnelled underneath it.
That combination, a cashel of considerable ambition paired with a souterrain dug into its own foundations, gives this site a quality that goes beyond the ordinary hilltop ringfort. A cashel is simply a ringfort whose enclosing wall is built of stone rather than earth and timber, and they are common enough across Ireland, but the layering of features here, and the way the builders read the natural landscape to supplement their own labour, makes this one worth attention.
The circular platform measures thirty metres in diameter and is enclosed by the remains of that drystone wall, now largely collapsed to about a metre in height. Large facing blocks can still be traced along the southern half of the cashel and at the north and northeast, suggesting the wall once presented a more imposing outer face. Beyond the cashel wall, running from the northwest around through north to northeast, there is a substantial bank of earth and stone, a fosse (a defensive ditch), and an outer bank beyond that, the whole arrangement spanning roughly fifteen metres in width. Both banks show evidence of stone revetment on their inner and outer faces, meaning the earthworks were reinforced with stonework, not simply piled up. The western side of the hill, where the slope falls away steeply on its own, required no such effort, and that stretch is left undefended by anything artificial. The entrance appears to have been at the east, also undefended by the outer banks and fosse, suggesting a deliberate arrangement. A rectangular pit has been cut into the inner face of the northern bank, purpose unknown. The souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage often used for storage or refuge, was constructed beneath or against the inner face of the cashel wall itself. A hundred metres to the east there is a hut site, and much of the upper hill is covered by a disused field system of uncertain age, suggesting this summit carried human activity across more than one period, though how those phases relate to one another is not clear.