Ringfort (Cashel), Raheennamadra, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Raheennamadra, Co. Limerick

Two low earthen platforms sit side by side in a Limerick pasture, so close together and so similarly shaped that they read, at first glance, as a single monument.

They are not. What survives at Raheennamadra is a pair of conjoined cashels, a cashel being a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, set roughly east to west with a cross-ditch between them and a shared fosse, or defensive ditch, wrapping around the outside. The western platform is the one recorded here; its neighbour lies immediately to the east. A further curiosity is the hollow to the south, which old surveys indicate was once a pond, suggesting the site had water management of some kind as part of its original arrangement.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp examined the pair in the period 1916 to 1919 and described them as part of what he called the 'Óenach Clochair mounds', each roughly D-shaped in plan, rising about 1.5 metres above the surrounding ground and enclosed by a fosse some 3.6 metres wide. Westropp noted that both platforms had originally been walled in large dry-stone masonry, though by his time nearly all of it had been removed. A Scandinavian survey carried out by Stenberger in 1960 and published in 1966 recorded the western structure as measuring approximately 31 by 40 metres, irregularly four-sided, and still rising between one and one and a quarter metres above ground level. The Ordnance Survey had already mapped the site twice: the 1840 six-inch edition showed it as a raised circular platform cut across at the south by a field boundary that post-dated 1700, while the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition recorded a roughly oval shape with a fosse visible from south around to the north-east.

The site sits in pasture about 270 metres north of the hill of Knockaunatarriff, close to the townland boundary with Mitchelstowndown North, and just north of two minor roads that can help orient a visitor approaching on foot. Aerial photographs taken in October 2002 and January 2003 by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland provide the clearest sense of the earthworks from above, and orthoimages from between 2011 and 2013 confirm that a farm shed has since been constructed at the southern edge of the monument, partially levelling that portion of the site. The platforms themselves are still discernible in the field, though the removal of the original stonework over centuries means the eye needs a moment to read the low rise of the ground for what it is.

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