Ringfort (Cashel), Kiltybo, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
At Kiltybo in County Mayo, a roughly oval enclosure sits on level ground at the top of a steep north-west-facing slope, its drystone wall quietly absorbing the surrounding farmland into its own logic.
A cashel, as this type of ringfort is known, is essentially a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval date, that would once have protected a farmstead and its inhabitants. What makes this one quietly interesting is the way centuries of reuse and partial collapse have left the structure in a kind of layered ambiguity, with later hands rebuilding over the old and the whole thing gradually settling back into the landscape.
The enclosure measures roughly 26.5 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south. Its wall survives best on the south-east arc, where it reaches three metres in width and just over a metre in height on both faces. Elsewhere the picture is more complicated. On the south-west and north-east arcs, a narrow modern drystone wall, only about 0.8 metres wide, has been built up on top of the spread of collapsed original stonework, probably to keep the boundary useful as a field division, which it still serves on the south-west side. On the north-west arc, where the ground naturally falls away, the original wall has been reduced to a stony scarp compensating for the slope rather than rising above it, and a low point here now provides the easiest way into the interior. Field walls radiating outward from the enclosure to the north, east-south-east, south-south-east, and west suggest the cashel has long acted as an organising point for the surrounding landholding. Inside, the ground is level and grassy, crossed by the low, sod-covered remains of a later field wall running roughly north to south. Abutting its west side, near the centre of the enclosure, is a D-shaped stony mound about 6.4 metres by 3.8 metres and half a metre high, interpreted as a field clearance heap, the accumulated debris of someone tidying the interior at some point long after the cashel's original purpose had passed. Brambles have taken hold in the enclosing wall, and forestry lies about 200 metres to the east.