Ringfort (Cashel), Drumfad, Co. Sligo

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Ringfort (Cashel), Drumfad, Co. Sligo

What looks at first like an ordinary field boundary in the pastures of Drumfad turns out, on closer inspection, to be something considerably older.

Set on a gentle south-south-east-facing slope with open ground falling away to the south, this small ringfort, known locally by the term cashel, a word used for stone-built or stone-lined enclosures of early medieval date, sits as a slightly raised circle roughly twenty metres across. The surrounding bank of earth and stone is modest in height, less than a metre on the interior face, and no fosse, the ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks, survives at ground level. What makes this particular example quietly curious is the layering of time visible in its fabric: an ancient enclosure that later hands have quietly reinterpreted.

The inner face of the original bank has been rebuilt as a drystone wall of limestone rubble, standing about one and a half metres high on the interior while barely protruding above the surrounding ground on the exterior, giving the structure a slightly lopsided character depending on which side you approach. Modern drystone field walls running north-west to south-east have been tied directly into the outer face of the bank at two points, folding the prehistoric boundary neatly into the working geometry of a later agricultural landscape. The original entrance, a gap of just over two metres wide at the east-north-east, is now blocked by more recent drystone walling, its position still legible as a break in the bank but no longer functional. A separate, newer opening cut into the bank and internal wall on the north-west side now serves as the practical way in.

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Pete F
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