Ringfort (Cashel), Canrooska, Co. Cork

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Ringfort (Cashel), Canrooska, Co. Cork

At Canrooska in West Cork, an early medieval cashel, a ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, contains something that most of its kind do not: a rectangular building erected inside its walls at some point in the nineteenth century.

That layering of periods, an ancient enclosure quietly repurposed within living memory of people still around to pass on the story, gives this small site an oddly domestic quality that sets it apart from the more straightforwardly ruinous ringforts scattered across the Irish countryside.

The cashel itself is modest in scale, a roughly circular area about fourteen metres across, enclosed by a stone wall that still stands to around a metre and a half in places, though it is in poor condition and about a metre and a half thick. A gap of roughly four metres in the south-eastern stretch of the wall marks what was likely the original entrance. Inside, occupying the northern half of the interior, sit the remains of a rectangular structure measuring approximately eight metres by five, with a doorway set in the centre of its south wall. Local tradition holds that this building dates to the nineteenth century, which would mean someone chose to shelter within the ancient enclosure long after its original inhabitants had gone, finding the old stone wall still useful enough to build against.

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