Ringfort (Cashel), Raherolus, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a low rise in the rough, rocky pasture of Raherolus in County Mayo, a broad circular earthwork sits quietly among wet boggy ground, commanding views in every direction.
What looks at first like a natural hummock is in fact the collapsed remains of a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by its enclosing wall of drystone rather than an earthen bank or ditch. The wall has long since tumbled, spreading outward into a sod-covered stone bank roughly six metres wide, but it still rises to two metres on the north-east and two and a half metres on the north, giving a clear impression of the original structure's ambition. The enclosed area measures approximately 34 metres north to south and 33.4 metres east to west, making this a substantial enclosure of early medieval character.
The wall's survival is uneven, as is typical for drystone structures left exposed to centuries of frost, rain, and agricultural reuse. Intact sections of the external face remain visible at the north and north-east, standing to just a few courses in height. A more substantial stretch, six metres long and 1.6 metres high, has been preserved at the south-south-east by an unlikely accident of later building: a small vernacular stone shed, now itself ruined, was constructed directly against the outer wall face, effectively shielding it from collapse. A two-metre gap in the wall at the south-east, partly blocked by boulders, may represent the original entrance, with a large stone on its north side possibly a remnant of the original facing. Inside the enclosure, the ground slopes gently southward, and a low sod-covered wall crosses the interior on a roughly north-north-east to south-south-west axis. A small hollow in the north-west quadrant, around 0.8 metres across and 0.4 metres deep, is partly filled with stones; its purpose is unclear.
The cashel does not sit in isolation. A ruined vernacular farmstead lies immediately to the west, and a laneway associated with that farmstead skirts the monument from the west around to the north-east. Later field walls have been built up against the cashel's outer face at the south-east and south-south-west, a pattern common across the Irish countryside where earlier structures were simply absorbed into the working landscape of succeeding generations, their original function long forgotten but their stone too useful to remove entirely.