Derrynavahagh Caher, Derrynavahagh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ringforts

Derrynavahagh Caher, Derrynavahagh, Co. Clare

One of the more telling details attached to this ancient enclosure in the Caher valley is that T.

J. Westropp, the indefatigable Clare antiquarian who documented dozens of ringforts and cashels across the Burren at the turn of the twentieth century, tried on three separate occasions to locate it and failed each time. That a man of his experience and persistence could not find it says something about the nature of this particular corner of County Clare, where karst uplands close in from east and west and the valley folds in on itself.

The structure itself is a cashel, a type of early medieval enclosure defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, though here the boundary is a mixture of both stone and earth. It sits in rough but improved pasture roughly 300 metres east of the Caher River, and measures approximately 33 metres east to west and 32 metres north to south, making it a reasonably substantial subcircular form. The surrounding bank runs between 2.4 and 3.1 metres wide and stands between 0.7 and 1.3 metres high, with some original external stone facing still visible at its base on the eastern side. A possible entrance, just over a metre and a half wide, opens to the southeast, and what may be an annexe, a secondary enclosure attached to the main structure, abuts the cashel on its southwestern side. The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1840 and 1916, though the earlier edition placed the hachuring, the cartographic symbol used to indicate an earthwork, about 30 metres too far to the west, which may not have helped Westropp's searches. Roughly 37 metres to the west lies a small separate enclosure, and about 150 metres to the east-southeast is a holy well known as Toberlonaun, or Tobair Lónáin, a name suggesting a dedication to an early Irish saint named Lonán.

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