Ringfort (Cashel), Poulacarran, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Poulacarran, Co. Clare

Most ringforts in Ireland are roughly circular, which makes this one in Poulacarran, County Clare, immediately unusual.

The cashel here, a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, is rectangular, measuring approximately 43 metres on its longer axis. That alone would mark it out, but add a hidden underground passage, a secondary enclosure tucked into one corner, and a mysterious pit near the centre, and the site starts to feel genuinely layered in a way that resists easy explanation.

The cashel sits at the southern edge of an undulating plateau, where the ground drops away steeply to the south-east and long views open out across a valley. Its enclosing wall, built with a double face of horizontally laid stone, originally stood to a respectable height, though collapse and centuries of reuse have reduced much of it. The inner face is now only legible at the north-west; elsewhere the wall has slumped to a rubble spread between 3.5 and 5.2 metres wide. Later farmers built their own drystone walls directly over the cashel's outer face, which tells you something about how long this landscape has been managed and remade by successive hands. The site sits within a large multiperiod field system, suggesting continuous agricultural use of the area across many centuries. Recorded on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it was noted only as an enclosure in a later monument record, a label that rather undersells what is actually there.

Below the north-central area of the cashel lies a souterrain, an artificial underground passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement, possibly used for storage or refuge. Near the centre of the interior is a quarry-like depression roughly 6.5 metres across and 2 metres deep, its original purpose unclear. In the north-east corner, a smaller rectangular corral was added at some point after the main cashel was built, its walls partly borrowing from the existing structure and incorporating several large stones. A second cashel, known as Poulcaragharush, stands about 136 metres to the north-north-west, which raises the quiet question of what was going on in this corner of Clare that warranted two such enclosures in close proximity.

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