Ringfort (Cashel), Lislahelly, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Lislahelly, Co. Sligo

On a gentle south-facing slope in the upland pasture of Lislahelly, a low circular bank describes a space that has largely been swallowed by the ordinary rhythms of farming.

This is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by its use of stone rather than a purely earthen construction, and the example here sits quietly in the landscape, easy to overlook unless you already know what you are looking for.

The enclosure is roughly 21 metres in diameter, bounded by a bank of earth and stone approximately four metres wide, though it rises only about 0.6 metres above the interior at its most pronounced. Ringforts were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock, and this one preserves enough of its original character to be legible. There is no fosse, the external ditch that commonly accompanies such monuments, visible at ground level here, and the bank thins considerably along the south-south-east to west-south-west arc. Most tellingly, a two-metre break in the bank on the north-west side, accompanied by a ramp leading down to the exterior, almost certainly marks where the original entrance once stood. Two further breaks elsewhere in the bank are more recent intrusions, products of agricultural activity rather than early medieval use, and a modern field boundary now crosses the eastern side of the monument, bisecting what would once have been a continuous perimeter.

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Pete F
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