Ringfort (Cashel), Liscarroll, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Liscarroll, Co. Cork

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the less common cousin of the earthen rath that dots the Irish countryside, and this one sits quietly on a hilltop above the valley where Liscarroll spreads out to the west.

What makes it worth pausing over is partly the view it commands and partly the quiet strangeness of its current condition: the enclosing bank has collapsed almost entirely to ground level, grass-covered and sinking back into the hill, its original entrance untraceable. The only gaps in the circuit are to the north and south, where agricultural machinery has worn the bank down to a width of about 2.6 metres, borrowing the ancient perimeter as a modern convenience.

The site was recorded on the 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a pair of concentric broken lines enclosing a roughly circular area, already suggesting a structure in poor repair by that point. Measured more precisely, the interior runs about 27.7 metres north to south and 20.3 metres east to west, with an external diameter reaching roughly 46 metres at its widest. The bank itself now stands no more than 0.4 metres above the exterior ground surface, a low grassy ridge that would be easy to miss without knowing what to look for. In the north-west quadrant there is a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that typically served early medieval farmsteads as storage space or a place of refuge. The interior surface is level but rough, scattered with loose stones and overgrown across the western half with low bushes.

The site is visible from the Liscarroll area and sits on elevated ground with open views down to the valley below. The low, overgrown bank and the scatter of stones across the interior repay a slow walk around the perimeter, particularly on the north-west side where the possible souterrain lies.

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