Cahernagree, Crumlin, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ringforts

Cahernagree, Crumlin, Co. Clare

A road cuts clean through this ringfort on the north-western slopes of Knockaunmountain in County Clare, and has done so since at least the first Ordnance Survey mapping of 1842.

That early six-inch map names the monument and shows the road already bisecting it from west to north-east, a piece of damage that the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, surveying the area between 1900 and 1902, described bluntly as the fort being "defaced by a road cut through it." The indignity, in other words, is not recent.

The fort sits on a level pasture terrace at around 774 to 775 feet above sea level, well below the summit of Knockaunmountain, which rises to 983 feet, but high enough to command wide views westward and around to the north-north-east. Its name carries some interest in itself. Writing in 1839, the scholar John O'Donovan translated it as "the Fort of the Horses," while Westropp preferred "the fort of the herds," both readings pointing to an association with livestock that still feels apt given the working farmland around it today. A swallow-hole nearby, a type of natural karst feature where surface water drains abruptly underground, shares a version of the same name: Poulnagree appears on the 1842 map roughly ten metres to the south of the fort, though a later 1915 edition places it considerably further to the south-west, suggesting either cartographic drift or some confusion between features. The fort itself is oval in plan, measuring roughly 34 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, with a later field wall extending away from its south-eastern sector. When the monument was inspected in 1998, most of its original fabric had been reduced to a low scarp barely half a metre high along its western perimeter, with surrounding ground noticeably disturbed by land reclamation. A modern farm track now runs along its eastern edge, passing a livestock waterhole and spring about 30 metres to the south-east, so the fort's old association with animals and water continues, however inadvertently.

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