Ringfort (Cashel), Skahanagh More, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Skahanagh More, Co. Cork

In the fields of Skahanagh More, a circular stone enclosure sits heavily overgrown, its southern bank broken open and its interior thick with ferns.

A large sandstone slab lies across the northern half of the interior, and local tradition insists that beneath or around it, a giant was buried. That alone would be enough to set this place apart from the hundreds of similar earthworks scattered across Munster, but the site carries an additional peculiarity: carvings on the western face of the stones, described as resembling a three-fingered hand, and apparently not unique to this spot. The same symbol, according to local knowledge, recurs in the wider area, which raises the possibility that these marks were meaningful within a shared local tradition, though what that tradition was remains unrecorded.

The enclosure is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by its stone rather than earthen bank, typically associated with early medieval farming settlement in Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. This one measures just under twenty-four metres in diameter, its bank still standing to about one and a half metres in height. A researcher named Myler, writing in 1998, noted a possible entrance feature on the eastern side, as well as two small stones roughly a foot high standing in a field about two yards to the north, with a cairn positioned to the east of them. A possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage sometimes used for storage or refuge, was also recorded approximately a hundred yards to the west. Whether that underground feature is connected to the cashel is not established, but the cluster of elements, the enclosure, the outlying stones, the cairn, and the possible passage, gives the immediate landscape an unusually dense character for what might otherwise seem a modest and unremarkable field boundary.

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