Ringfort (Cashel), Frenchbrook, Co. Mayo

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Ringfort (Cashel), Frenchbrook, Co. Mayo

On a small hill in Frenchbrook, Co. Mayo, a cashel sits with almost nothing left to show what it once was.

A cashel is a type of ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and here the wall has been almost entirely taken away, leaving behind only a scarp on the western side and some remnants of large limestone kerb-stones along the eastern and southern edges. What remains is essentially the shape of a place, an oval platform roughly 41 metres east to west and 27.7 metres north to south, its outline determined less by deliberate planning than by the natural limits of the hilltop itself.

The site rewards close attention precisely because so little is obvious at first. The interior is largely level, but a sod-covered rise near the eastern edge hints at something buried or collapsed beneath, and a barely discernible linear rise runs across the middle of the interior on a north-northwest to south-southeast axis, suggesting the cashel may once have been internally divided. In the southwest quadrant, the ground dips toward a slightly sunken entrance gap, about two metres wide and defined on its western side by close-set stones, which opens onto a low causeway extending some ten to twelve metres across a natural dip in the ridge. Local tradition holds that a stone-built souterrain, an underground passage or chamber commonly found in early medieval Irish settlements, once ran beneath the interior. Ten metres to the north-northwest lies a ringbarrow, a low circular burial mound, and roughly forty metres to the south-southeast sits a further enclosure, making this hilltop part of a small, scattered cluster of ancient remains set into the sharply undulating limestone landscape of this part of Mayo.

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Pete F
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