Ringfort (Cashel), Larganboy, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Larganboy, Co. Mayo

A cashel is a type of ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and the one at Larganboy in County Mayo presents an unusual puzzle: it went unrecorded on Ordnance Survey maps in both 1838 and 1917, meaning it sat in plain sight for generations of cartographers without ever making it onto the page.

It sits on a NE-facing slope of a ridge that once looked out over Mannin Lake, now drained, and the views it commands across undulating grassland to the SE and SW suggest it was placed with some deliberateness. The southern arc of its enclosing wall has vanished entirely, but what remains, a sod-covered stone bank roughly three and a half to four metres wide curving from SW to N, still traces a roughly circular enclosure of around 85 to 90 metres across.

What makes the interior particularly layered is the evidence of later occupation written across it. Field boundaries from the early modern era have been cut across the original enclosure on two axes, slicing the interior into four roughly equal strips. In the south-eastern half, the dividing walls survive as proper drystone construction; in the north-western half, they have collapsed to low stony banks or scarps. These partitions follow the natural terracing of the slope downward from SW to NE, and faint cultivation ridges, the corrugated remains of lazy-bed farming, are still visible in the north-western portion. Whoever ploughed and planted here was not particularly concerned with preserving what lay beneath. Near the inner face of the enclosing bank at the north-west, there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind commonly found associated with early medieval settlement sites, which may have served for storage or refuge during the cashel's original period of use.

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