Ringfort (Cashel), Carrownlacka, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
A cashel is a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, and the one at Carrownlacka in County Mayo presents an immediate puzzle to anyone who looks closely: it has no entrance.
No gateway, no lintel, no threshold. The only way in is through two sections of collapsed wall at the south and northwest, gaps that are the result of decay rather than design. That detail alone sets the place slightly apart from the usual logic of an enclosure meant to keep things in or out.
The structure is oval in plan, measuring roughly 30 metres east to west and 37 metres north to south, enclosed by a drystone wall between two and two-and-a-half metres thick. What makes its construction particularly considered is the way it handles the terrain. The cashel sits on a break of slope, and rather than ignoring the gradient, whoever built it cut into the hillside along the eastern and southwestern arc, turning the wall at that side into a facing set against a deliberate scarp. The effect is that the enclosure appears to grow out of the slope rather than simply sit on it. The outer face remains largely intact, with basal courses of large boulders supporting upper courses of horizontally laid stone slabs, though some sections to the east and southeast show signs of later modification or rebuilding. The inner face has fared less well, collapsing in places and now almost entirely covered by sod and heather. Along the north and northwest interior, low sod-covered stone heaps abut the inner wall; these may represent further wall collapse, or could be the residue of field clearance. Inside the enclosure, a kidney-shaped cairn of field stones, about 6.6 metres long and 0.8 metres high, sits in the northwest quadrant, its purpose unresolved.
The cashel occupies rough, rocky pasture with wide views opening particularly to the south, and at its northeastern and southeastern base the ground flattens into wet, rush-grown terrain. Immediately to the north, a network of small rectangular and sub-rectangular fields survives, dotted with clearance cairns, suggesting the landscape around the cashel was once carefully organised for farming. The monument and its surrounding field system together give a sense of a small community that worked this hillside with some thoroughness, even if almost nothing of who they were or when they lived here has survived above the heather.