Ringfort (Cashel), Tully, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ringforts
On the flat crown of a north-south ridge in Tully, Co. Sligo, the land has been quietly rearranged over many centuries in ways that only become clear when you know what you are looking at.
What appears to be an ordinary arrangement of field walls and limestone rubble is, in fact, the remains of a cashel, a type of ringfort defined not by earthen banks but by drystone stone enclosures. This one originally consisted of two concentric stone walls, an inner and an outer, separated by a flat berm roughly four metres wide. Double-walled cashels of this kind were among the more substantial expressions of early medieval settlement in Ireland, suggesting a site of some local importance.
The inner enclosure measures about twenty-five metres in diameter and was built from roughly quarried, un-coursed limestone blocks, each averaging around a metre in length and close to half a metre thick. At its best-preserved points, the inner wall still shows patches of its original facing, though much of both walls has long since collapsed inward, leaving banks of loose rubble limestone rather than standing masonry. The outer wall, which once stood at a similar modest height, has fared worse; no original facing survives there at all. Subsequent generations, working the land around it, have made liberal use of what remained. Along the north-east to south-east arc, the inner side of the collapsed bank has been rebuilt as a functioning drystone field wall, and further modern walls have been laid directly on top of the ruined outer cashel wall along the south-east to north-west stretch. The original entrance has been lost entirely, absorbed into these later interventions and now unrecognisable on the ground.