Ringfort (Rath), Ballynahowna, Co. Sligo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballynahowna, Co. Sligo

On a slope above the Easky River in County Sligo, a roughly oval enclosure sits in a state of near-total collapse, its walls reduced in places to little more than a low ridge in the grass.

What survives is enough to read the shape of the place: an enclosure roughly fifty metres at its longest, built from drystone masonry with only small amounts of earth binding it together. This is a cashel, the term used for a ringfort constructed primarily from stone rather than earthen banks and ditches, and though hundreds of such sites survive across Ireland, this one carries a particular quiet strangeness in the detail of what remains.

The enclosing wall, once perhaps two metres wide, now stands no higher than about a metre at its tallest points and drops to little more than a scatter of stone at others. Any original entrance has been lost entirely. More intriguing is what lies at the centre of the interior: a roughly rectangular raised platform, approximately fourteen metres by eleven and a half, elevated between ten centimetres and sixty centimetres above the surrounding ground. This platform is thought to represent the footprint of a structure, possibly a house, though whatever stood there has long since disappeared. At the outer face of the cashel wall, a short run of mortared stone has been built directly against it at some later point, the last surviving fragment of a field boundary, suggesting that long after the ringfort fell out of use the wall was simply absorbed into the working landscape around it, pressed into service as a convenient edge for a farmer's field.

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Pete F
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