Ringfort (Cashel), Magheraghanrush, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement common in early medieval Ireland, and the one at Magheraghanrush is notable less for what survives than for what has quietly disappeared.
When a late nineteenth-century antiquarian recorded the site, the interior was populated with features: a circular hut foundation, a souterrain (an underground stone-lined passage, likely used for storage or refuge), and a bullaun stone, a boulder bearing one or more cup-shaped depressions associated with early Christian and pre-Christian ritual use. By the time anyone looked carefully again in 2003, not one of those internal features could be found. The enclosing bank itself remains, an oval of rubble limestone roughly 60 to 65 metres across its longest axis, with walls around 4.6 metres wide though only half a metre high on the interior face. It sits on a gentle south-west-facing slope in upland terrain now covered by coniferous forestry, overlooked by higher ground to the north-east and looking down over a narrow valley to the west.
The antiquarian in question was Milligan, who recorded the site in 1890 to 1891, noting the hut site, the souterrain, and the bullaun stone in some detail. A subrectangular area in the southern half of the interior, roughly 15 by 17 metres and partitioned off by a rubble wall, was still visible enough to appear on the 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, as was a circular feature in the northern half. The same map also shows an east-west field wall cutting across the southern edge of the cashel, intersecting with the enclosing bank at both the south-east and south-west. Whether this wall was added long after the cashel's original use, or represents some later agricultural reworking of the space, the notes do not say. What is clear is that over the course of roughly a century, between Milligan's visit and the 2003 inspection, the interior was effectively erased, most likely by forestry activity and the gradual collapse and spread of loose rubble.