Ringfort (Cashel), Ballymore, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On a low ridge in the rough heather-ground of Ballymore in County Mayo, there is a cashel that has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape around it.
A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the drystone equivalent of the more familiar earthen rath, and this example has had an unusual fate: part of its enclosing wall now functions as an ordinary field boundary, indistinguishable at a glance from the network of property walls that surround it. The construction is so similar in scale and character to those adjacent walls, with a width of roughly a metre and a surviving height of around the same, that without careful attention the ancient enclosure could simply read as another division of farmland.
The structure encloses a flat, roughly circular area measuring about 21.5 metres north to south and 22.5 metres east to west. On the southern half, the drystone wall appears to rest on a low berm or scarp, a slightly raised platform projecting from beneath it, which hints at an earlier or more deliberate phase of construction beneath what now survives. On the western arc, the wall has been levelled almost entirely and can only be traced as a heather-covered rise in the ground. Several modern field walls meet the enclosure at the northeast, southeast, and south, pressing up against it in ways that make reading the original circuit a matter of patience. The site sits on a gentle NNE to SSW ridge, with the ground falling away to the southeast, which would have given the original inhabitants of the cashel open sightlines across a wide arc from east through south to southwest, a likely consideration for anyone choosing where to build a defended homestead, probably somewhere in the early medieval period.
The enclosure is set in rough, stony, heather-grown pasture, and the Western arc in particular requires some attention to spot, given how completely the vegetation has reclaimed it. The eastern wall section, still standing and still in use as a field boundary, is the most legible part of the circuit and the best starting point for tracing the full outline of what was once a coherent enclosed settlement.