Ringfort (Cashel), Eanty More, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Eanty More, Co. Clare

At the western edge of a karst plateau in County Clare, the ground drops away sharply by around 42 metres, and it is on this exposed lip of limestone upland that a roughly square cashel sits in rough pasture, its walls reduced to little more than a stone spread across the grass.

A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank and ditch, and this one at Eanty More is unusual for being rectangular rather than the circular form more commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland. Measuring approximately 37 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, it sits within a wider field system that has been in use across multiple periods, suggesting this corner of the Burren has been worked and lived in for a very long time.

When the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and wrote about the site in 1899, he described it as a fairly square fort that was nearly levelled, and the intervening century has not been kind to it. The enclosing wall, originally double-faced with a width of nearly two metres on the east side, survives mostly as collapsed rubble spread across both its inner and outer faces. A crude entrance midway along the east wall, just over a metre wide, is now blocked with stones. Inside the cashel, two structures are thought to post-date its original occupation: a house site in the south-west corner, and a small stone-lined structure built against the inner wall-face, its interior measuring roughly 1.8 by 1.6 metres. Extending westward from the north-west corner, a substantial but very poorly preserved double-faced wall runs for around 13 metres, perhaps once connecting the cashel to the wider landscape of enclosures and boundaries around it. The site was already being mapped by the Ordnance Survey in 1842 and again in 1920, recorded with hachuring that indicated an earthwork feature.

The cashel does not sit in isolation. Another cashel lies roughly 98 metres to the south-west, a further enclosure approximately 130 metres to the south-east, and a holy well around 109 metres to the north-north-west. That clustering of monument types, combined with the long-lived field system surrounding them, suggests that this windswept plateau edge was once a place of some local significance, a node in a landscape that was organised, inhabited, and perhaps ritually marked across many generations.

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