Ringfort (Cashel), Killaturly, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
A cashel is a ringfort built from stone rather than earth, a form of enclosed settlement used across early medieval Ireland, and the one at Killaturly in County Mayo survives in a quietly ambiguous state, neither ruined nor intact but somewhere between the two.
Its roughly circular enclosure, measuring about 37 metres east to west and 40.5 metres north to south, is defined by a low stone bank that has been added to over many generations with field clearance material, giving it an uneven, hummocky appearance that makes it easy to mistake for a natural feature of the landscape.
The bank varies considerably in width and height depending on where you look. On the north-east arc it broadens to around 4.5 metres, though it rises only about 0.4 metres above the interior ground level. On the southern arc, the original structure is most obscured by the addition of cleared field stones, accumulated during agricultural use of the surrounding land. Two drystone field walls, a familiar sight across the west of Ireland, cut across the north-west and eastern edges of the enclosure, meeting just north of the site. The eastern of these walls doubles as the townland boundary, meaning the old cashel now sits precisely on the administrative edge between one named place and another. A short remnant of an older field wall at the western side abuts the enclosing bank, hinting at layered episodes of use stretching across centuries. Inside the enclosure, the ground is level, and a small heap of sod-covered clearance stone sits in the southern half, the residue of someone else's tidying elsewhere in the field.
The site sits in pasture on gently undulating ground, with a low heather-covered ridge rising to the south and south-east. A road leading to a commercial quarry runs roughly 20 metres to the east, which gives some sense of the working agricultural and industrial landscape that now surrounds what was once a domestic enclosure.