Ringfort (Cashel), Rathmore South, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
Most ringforts are defined by earthen banks, but this one in Rathmore South was built from stone, making it a cashel, the term used for a ringfort constructed with a dry-stone wall rather than a raised earthen rampart.
What makes it particularly striking now is precisely how little of that wall survives. The stone has been systematically removed over the years, the facing largely robbed out, and the entrance has become unreadable. What remains sits quietly in low-lying pasture, threaded through with land drains and watercourses, closer to the townland boundary with Dunkip than to any obvious landmark.
When O'Kelly recorded the site in 1944, the picture was already one of considerable loss. Writing in that year, he noted a simple stone fort without a fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, meaning this enclosure relied entirely on its wall for definition rather than combining wall and ditch as some examples do. He recorded a diameter of roughly 180 feet, or about 55 metres, and observed that only a small section of facing stones on the southern side still held their original form. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped it at 25 inches to the mile in 1897, it was already being recorded as an earthwork rather than a standing structure, measuring approximately 61 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 60 metres across the northwest to southeast. Aerial photographs taken in September and October 2002 for the Archaeological Survey of Ireland confirmed the subcircular shape from above, along with a notably straight edge along the northwestern side, a detail that is otherwise unexplained in the record.
The monument sits within the southern portion of a broader field system, and reaching it means crossing working farmland, so any visit would require landowner permission. There is no formal access or signage. Aerial imagery from various sources, including Google Earth coverage from 2018, remains the clearest way to appreciate the overall form, since at ground level the collapsed wall presents as little more than a low, spread rubble spread across the pasture. The small remnant of facing stones on the south side, noted by O'Kelly over eighty years ago, is the most tangible physical detail still worth looking for, though its condition today is unrecorded in the available sources.