Slievemore Caher, Bal Of Dookinelly, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Slievemore Caher, Bal Of Dookinelly, Co. Mayo

On the slopes of Slievemore, the great quartzite mountain that dominates the northern end of Achill Island, there sits a caher whose details remain frustratingly out of reach.

A caher is a stone ringfort, typically a roughly circular enclosure defined by a substantial dry-stone wall, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of shelter and occasional defence. They are common enough across the west of Ireland, but each one carries its own particular character, shaped by the landscape it occupies and the people who once moved through it.

Slievemore itself has a long and layered human history. The mountain is best known for the deserted village at its base, a settlement that was largely abandoned during and after the Great Famine of the 1840s, though seasonal occupation known as booleying, the practice of moving livestock to upland pastures in summer, had shaped patterns of life there for centuries before that. The townland of Dookinelly sits within this broader landscape of occupation and dispersal. A caher in this location would fit into a pattern of early medieval settlement that used the elevated, well-drained ground of the lower mountain slopes, positioning enclosures where cattle could be watched and land could be worked. Beyond its location on Slievemore and its classification as a caher, the specific history of this enclosure, its construction date, its dimensions, and any finds or features recorded within it, remains undocumented in publicly available sources.

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Pete F
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