Ringfort (Cashel), Reen By.), Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
On the western shore of Blind Harbour in West Cork, a low ring of tumbled stone sits in open pasture, easy to miss unless you already know what you are looking for.
What remains is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and this one has been reduced by time and weather to a collapsed, grass-covered outline roughly nineteen metres across. It is a modest footprint, but the coastal views from the spot are extensive, which may well have been part of the point.
Ringforts of this kind are among the most common early medieval monuments in Ireland, with an estimated forty to fifty thousand surviving in various states across the island. Most date from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century and functioned as enclosed farmsteads, the wall defining a protected space for a household and its livestock. Stone-built examples, cashels, tend to cluster in areas where suitable field stone was more readily available than the material needed for earthen raths. Here, the circular enclosure measures 18.9 metres north to south and 18.6 metres east to west. A modern field fence cuts across the interior on an east-west line near the northern edge, and cultivation ridges, the kind left by lazy-bed potato growing or earlier spade tillage, run across the interior on a north-south axis, evidence that the enclosed ground was still being worked long after any memory of the structure's original purpose had faded.