Ringfort (Cashel), Cunnagher, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
In the townland of Cunnagher in County Mayo, there survives a cashel, a type of ringfort whose enclosing boundary is built from stone rather than earthen banks.
Ringforts, which date broadly from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, were the most common form of rural settlement in ancient Ireland. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, scattered through farmland, bog, and hillside. The cashel variant is particularly associated with the west of Ireland, where good building stone was more readily available than the timber or earthen material used elsewhere. Cunnagher sits in a part of Mayo where such structures are not unexpected, yet each one carries its own quiet particularity, a surviving outline of a life organised around enclosure, livestock, and the rhythms of an agrarian world that has otherwise largely vanished.