Ringfort (Cashel), Tuogh (Kenry By.), Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Tuogh (Kenry By.), Co. Limerick

In a field in County Limerick, an early medieval enclosure has found a second life as an apple orchard.

The dry-stone wall that still stands curves from south-west to east, its interior face rising to about 1.15 metres and its exterior face to 1.3 metres, enclosing an oval space roughly 26 metres east to west and at least 25 metres north to south. Mature apple trees now occupy the ground where, over a thousand years ago, a family would have lived, kept animals, and gone about their daily work.

A cashel, in Irish archaeological terms, is a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, and this particular example sits in the Tuogh townland within the old barony of Kenry, in the south of County Limerick. Ringforts were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This one has fared unevenly. The farmyard immediately to the north has grown into the site over time, overlying the south-eastern segment of the original enclosure, and the wall along the east-to-south-west arc has been removed entirely, replaced by a shed and a gate that now serves as the functional entrance into the interior. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.

The enclosure sits immediately north of the farmyard, which means access to the interior currently runs through the farm gate on the eastern side, where the original stonework has been lost. The surviving dry-stone wall to the south-west and around to the east is still reasonably intact and worth examining closely for its construction. Once inside, the orchard of mature apple trees fills the space completely, their canopies likely obscuring much of the ground surface in summer. Visiting in late autumn, after leaf fall, would give the clearest sense of the enclosure's oval shape and the relationship between the surviving wall and the farmyard structures that have absorbed what once would have been its eastern edge.

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Pete F
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