Ringfort (Cashel), Lislahelly, Co. Sligo

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Ringfort (Cashel), Lislahelly, Co. Sligo

A derelict farmhouse gable poking beyond the line of an ancient wall is a peculiar sight, and it captures precisely what has happened at this cashel on the uplands of Lislahelly in County Sligo.

A cashel is a type of early medieval ringfort enclosed by a dry-stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one sits on the summit of a narrow east-west ridge, its raised oval platform measuring roughly 27 metres by 23 metres. The wall, built from random limestone rubble, still stands to an internal height of just over a metre along part of its circuit, though elsewhere only the footings survive at interior level. There is no fosse, the defensive ditch that typically surrounds earthen ringforts, visible anywhere around the site.

The cashel has had a complicated afterlife. Along the south-west to north-east arc, the wall appears to have been dismantled and reused as a field boundary, a fate common to many such monuments in farming landscapes where dressed or loosely stacked stone was simply too useful to leave undisturbed. The external basal facing has been rebuilt along the east to south-west section, suggesting the structure was modified rather than simply quarried. Most striking is the modern farmhouse whose gable end, four metres wide, extends just beyond the inner face of the wall on the north-east to east-north-east side, meaning a relatively recent building was constructed partly within and partly athwart the ancient enclosure. A ramp roughly six metres wide on the eastern side, widened at some point in modern times, preserves the line of what was almost certainly the original entrance to the cashel. Inside, the terrain is not entirely flat: the central third of the enclosed area levels out, while the northern third slopes gently northward and the southern third drops away toward the south, following the natural contours of the ridge on which the whole structure was built.

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