Ringfort (Cashel), Cloonoghil, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Ringforts
Something about the drystone wall enclosing this modest hillocky patch of County Roscommon suggests layers of purpose accumulated over centuries.
The structure visible today is a rebuilt wall, roughly one and a half metres high on its eastern side and nearly two metres wide, with noticeably larger stones laid at the base. That detail matters: the bigger stones at the bottom hint that the rebuilt wall may be sitting on top of something considerably older, possibly a cashel, which is a stone-walled ringfort of early medieval date, typically associated with a farming household or minor local lord.
The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 as a circular wooded enclosure with a diameter of around 35 metres, and is shown again, this time without tree cover, on the 1915 edition of the same map. The interior today is a subcircular grass-covered area measuring approximately 36.6 metres north-northeast to south-southwest and 33.3 metres west-northwest to east-southeast, set within an undulating landscape. That the woodland had cleared away between those two map editions is in itself a small piece of local history, suggesting either active clearance or a change in how the land was managed over the intervening decades. A second enclosure sits roughly 50 metres to the east, which raises the possibility that this corner of Cloonoghil once held a more complex arrangement of enclosed spaces than the single remaining structure suggests.