Ringfort (Cashel), Raheennamadra, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
Two low platforms sit side by side in a grazing field in County Limerick, their outlines just legible enough to suggest something deliberate, something organised, beneath the grass.
What makes this site quietly puzzling is that neither platform stands alone. Together they form a pair of probable cashels, a cashel being a type of ringfort defined by a stone rather than earthen enclosure, and they appear to share a cross-ditch that once divided them, as though two separate enclosures were at some point conceived as a single compound. The eastern of the two, the one recorded here, measures roughly 38 metres from north-west to south-east and 37 metres across, its edges traced by a scarp rather than an upstanding wall. That wall is mostly gone now.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing between 1917 and 1919, recorded the pair under the name the 'Óenach Clochair mounds', a name that carries early medieval resonance, óenach being an Old Irish word for a public assembly or fair. He noted that each platform was roughly D-shaped in plan, standing about 1.5 metres high, with a surrounding fosse some 3.6 metres wide and a cross-ditch of about 2.7 metres dividing the two. The original dry-stone walling, he observed, had been almost entirely removed. To the south he recorded an outer bank and a hollow leading down to what he described as an old pond. By 1960, when the Swedish archaeologist Mårten Stenberger resurveyed the site as part of a wider study, the eastern platform had axes of around 40 by 42 metres, broadly consistent with Westropp's measurements, and the earthwork was catalogued as Site III in his published account of 1966. The Ordnance Survey had mapped the feature as early as 1840, when it appeared on the six-inch series as a raised circular platform, though the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition captured its more complex D-shaped character.
The site sits in pasture approximately 45 metres east of the townland boundary with Mitchelstowndown North, with the Morningstar River catchment close by and the modest rise of Knockaunatarriff, at 443 feet above datum, visible about 270 metres to the south. Aerial photographs taken in October 2002 and January 2003, along with satellite imagery from the early 2010s, show the monument as a circular cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in vegetation that betrays a buried or levelled feature. A modern farm track running roughly east to west has clipped the southern edge, and a linear cropmark cuts across the south-east. The monument is on agricultural land, so access would require landowner permission, and the most legible view of the overall plan is likely from aerial or satellite imagery rather than ground level, where the remaining earthworks are low and the context of the paired enclosures is difficult to read without knowing what to look for.