Ringfort (Cashel), Loughaun, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Loughaun, Co. Limerick

A working farm field in County Limerick is not the most obvious place to find early medieval architecture, yet at Loughaun the ground itself gives the game away.

Pushing up through the pasture, the outcropping limestone hints at what is underfoot, and the oval outline of a collapsed dry-stone bank marks the boundary of a cashel, a type of ringfort enclosed by stone rather than earth. Ringforts, broadly speaking, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and the cashel variant is particularly associated with limestone-rich landscapes where building stone was easy to come by.

The enclosure here is oval in plan, measuring roughly 29 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, its perimeter formed by a dry-stone bank that survives to an internal height of just under a metre and an external height of a little over a metre. The best-preserved section runs from the south-west around to the north-north-east, and at some point in the site's later agricultural life a field-wall was built along the top of the ancient bank, adding another 1.3 metres of height and blurring the boundary between prehistoric enclosure and post-medieval land management. The interior is level and now covered by mature trees. A separate stone bank, lower at around 0.6 metres, encloses the south-east quadrant internally, while at the south an earth and stone bank meets the outer face and extends outward for roughly 22 metres along a north-south axis before gradually fading into the ground. Dry-stone field boundaries abut the outer bank face at the south-west, north-east, and east, all of which speaks to centuries of quiet reuse by whoever farmed this land long after the cashel's original purpose was forgotten. The site was recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011.

The cashel sits in open pasture, so access depends on the goodwill of the landowner and the condition of the ground underfoot; limestone country can be uneven beneath the grass, and the outcropping rock makes for slow going in wet weather. The tree cover in the interior means the enclosure reads more clearly from the outside, where the relationship between the ancient bank and the later field-walls is easiest to follow. The south side, where the earthen bank trails away into the slope, rewards a slow circuit of the perimeter.

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