Ringfort (Cashel), Killonahan, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
What sets this site apart from the hundreds of earthen ringforts scattered across the Irish midlands and west is its walls.
Where most ringforts were defined by a raised bank of compacted earth and a surrounding ditch, this one is a cashel, meaning the enclosure is built entirely in dry stone, a construction method more commonly associated with the rocky landscapes of Clare or the Aran Islands than the softer pastures of County Limerick. The wall here is substantial: roughly 3.55 metres wide, standing over two metres in height on both its inner and outer faces in the sections where it survives. That is less a boundary marker than a genuine defensive structure, built to be seen and to last.
The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840 recorded the site as a circular fort ringed with trees, which gives some sense of how it would have appeared to a nineteenth-century surveyor crossing this gently rolling ground. By the time the twenty-five-inch edition was published in 1897, it was mapped as a scarped oval enclosure sitting at the junction of three fields, with external dimensions of roughly 45 metres north to south and 54 metres east to west. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected it in 2000, they found the interior level, dry, and largely free of overgrowth, with the cashel wall partially collapsed along the northern, eastern, southern, and north-western arcs. The probable entrance on the west-south-west side, about six metres wide, appears to have been widened at some point to allow farm vehicles through, a common enough fate for monuments that survived into working agricultural land. Tree roots from vegetation growing on the wall have since penetrated the stone core around much of its circuit.
The cashel lies in gently undulating pasture about 530 metres west-north-west of Killonahan Church and its associated graveyard, and a second ringfort sits roughly 400 metres to the south, suggesting this corner of Limerick was once a fairly occupied landscape. The site sits close to the townland boundary with Garranroe. Because it is on private farmland, access would require permission from the landowner. Those who do get a look will find that the most legible sections of the double-faced wall are worth tracing carefully; what appears at a glance to be a lumpy field boundary reveals itself, on closer inspection, to be a structure with real architectural intention behind it.