Ringfort (Cashel), Lurgan, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Lurgan, Co. Mayo

On a ridge above the boglands of Lurgan in County Mayo, a circular enclosure sits at the exact point where the ground begins to drop away towards the south-west.

It is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by stone rather than earthen banks, and though its walls have been reduced over centuries to little more than a low stony scarp, the logic of its original placement remains easy to read. From here, whoever lived within it could watch across rolling pasture to the south and south-west, and westward over a wide expanse of open bog. A steep fall into a boggy valley lies about a hundred metres to the north-east, making the ridge both a commanding and a naturally sheltered position.

Ringforts were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its associated buildings within a defensive perimeter. A cashel used stone construction rather than a raised earthen bank, and this example at Lurgan measures roughly twenty-three metres across in both directions, a modest but respectable size. Remnants of stone facing survive at the south and south-west of the scarp, which still stands between 0.8 and one metre high in places, suggesting the enclosure once had a more substantial wall. No clear evidence of the original entrance has survived, which is not unusual where later agricultural activity has disturbed a site. A field wall running on a north-west to south-east axis now crosses the south-western edge of the enclosure, folding the ancient boundary into a later property line in the way that so many Irish landscapes layer one era of land use on top of another.

The interior has suffered considerably. Two quarry pits have been dug into the enclosed ground, one in the north-east quadrant and a larger one running from the north towards the centre, the latter roughly twelve metres long and a metre deep. This kind of quarrying within cashel interiors is a recurring problem across the west of Ireland, where convenient dressed or semi-dressed stone was simply extracted for field walls, roads, or buildings as the need arose. What was once a level interior is now significantly hollowed out, leaving the site readable in outline from the surrounding pasture but considerably altered from what its original occupants would have known.

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Pete F
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