Ringfort (Cashel), Glencolumbkille, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Glencolumbkille, Co. Clare

What remains of this oval stone enclosure in County Clare is, by most measures, barely there at all.

Spread across a moderately steep, overgrown slope facing east, the structure has collapsed to little more than a moss-covered tumble of stone, nowhere rising above 0.9 metres and in places barely 0.4 metres high. There is no discernible entrance, no surviving facing-stones, just a spread of rubble between roughly 1.9 and 3.7 metres wide tracing an oval roughly 32 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south. That it is recognisable as anything purposeful at all is, in its own quiet way, remarkable.

This is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, a form of enclosed farmstead or defended homestead common across Ireland in the early medieval period. Its condition is described as very poorly preserved, which is perhaps underselling the degree to which the centuries have worked on it. Surveyors working in the nineteenth century did record it: the Ordnance Survey marked it with hachures, the short lines used to indicate an enclosure or raised feature, on their six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1915, which at least confirms its presence across that span. More recently it was catalogued as an enclosure rather than a cashel, reflecting the difficulty of classifying something so degraded. What gives the site an additional layer of quiet strangeness is its proximity to a children's burial ground lying roughly 250 metres to the north-east. Such burial grounds, known in Irish as cilliní, were typically used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, and their placement near older, pre-Christian or early Christian features is a pattern found repeatedly across the Irish landscape, though the precise relationship between any two such sites is rarely easy to untangle.

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Pete F
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