Ringfort (Cashel), Creggawatta, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Creggawatta, Co. Mayo

In the pasture at Creggawatta, a faint sod-covered ridge barely twenty centimetres high describes a rough oval in the limestone grassland of County Mayo.

It would be easy to walk past without registering it at all. What you are looking at is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone rather than earthen enclosure, and one that the landscape has been quietly reclaiming for some time. The enclosure measures roughly 48.5 metres north to south and 52.5 metres east to west, its wall reduced to a flat-topped rise from which stones protrude at irregular intervals. The ground inside is level but pocked and disturbed, particularly across the western half, by small-scale quarrying of the bedrock seams that lie just beneath the surface.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 as a clearly defined circular embanked enclosure, approximately 30 metres in diameter, already bisected on a north-south axis by a field boundary. By the 1930 edition it had vanished from the map entirely, swallowed by the gradual reorganisation of the agricultural landscape around it. That disappearance from the cartographic record tells its own story: field walls were extended across the interior, a later east-west property wall clipped the outer edge of the enclosure at the north-northeast, and the earlier north-south wall that once crossed the interior was removed, though faint traces of it remain visible on the ground. Ringforts of this kind were typically built and occupied during the early medieval period in Ireland, serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or household. The cashel at Creggawatta sits on a fairly level plateau with natural limestone outcroppings defining its southeastern edge, the enclosing wall at that side coinciding with a break of slope where the ground drops away in a series of low natural terraces.

The most quietly curious detail at the site is a limestone slab set into the enclosing wall at the northwest. Its naturally corrugated surface contains a circular depression roughly 30 centimetres across, and within that depression are three smaller hollows. Whether these were formed by natural weathering or worked by hand, and what purpose they may have served, is not recorded. It is the kind of feature that rewards a slow look rather than a quick pass.

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Pete F
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