Ringfort (Rath), Cashel, Co. Cavan

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cashel, Co. Cavan

What makes this ringfort in Cashel, County Cavan, quietly arresting is the degree to which later occupation has folded itself into a much older shape.

The raised circular enclosure, with an interior diameter of just under 22 metres, is defined by two substantial earthen banks separated by a wide, deep fosse, the term for the ditch dug between them. That double-bank arrangement marks it out as a more elaborate example of its type; most raths, the earthen ringforts that were the standard farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, made do with a single bank and ditch. Here, the outer bank also carries stone facing on its exterior, though this is thought to date from the modern period rather than from the original construction, suggesting the site was maintained or modified by later landowners with an eye to tidiness or boundary-marking.

The original entrance survives at the south-south-west, where corresponding gaps in both banks are linked by a causeway crossing the fosse. It is a rare point of legibility in a site that has otherwise accumulated layers of interference. A drainage trench cut through the outer bank at the south-west in recent years has added a further intrusion to the earthworks. Inside, the western half of the enclosed area is taken up by the remains of a rectangular stone building, measuring roughly 16.6 metres on its longer axis and just under 5 metres wide. It is thought to represent a house, though no entrance can be identified in what remains of its walls. At the centre of the interior, there is a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval ringforts, used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation of byres above ground.

The layering here is what gives the site its character: an early medieval enclosure, a later stone building inserted into its interior, modern drainage work cutting through its banks, and a facing of stone added to the outer earthwork at some unknown point in between. Each intervention sits on top of the last, and the original purpose of the whole has long since given way to something harder to name.

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