Ringfort (Cashel), Lismoher, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Lismoher, Co. Clare

In the rough pasture and hazel scrub of Lismoher, County Clare, a circular stone wall has been quietly collapsing for the better part of a millennium, and somebody at some point decided to build a newer wall on top of the ruin anyway.

That layering of uses, one structure cannibalising another, is what makes this particular site worth a second look. The cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a dry-stone enclosing wall rather than an earthen bank, now survives only as a low, spread rubble ring. Its outer wall-face can still be traced around most of the perimeter, but the inner face has long since vanished into the scatter.

The cashel measures roughly 19.7 metres east to west and 18.8 metres north to south, sitting on a gently south-facing slope within a much larger field system that itself spans multiple periods of use. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its six-inch maps in 1920, the feature was considered significant enough to be marked with hachures, the small radiating lines cartographers used to indicate earthworks and enclosures. When the Record of Monuments and Places was compiled in 1996, it was catalogued simply as an enclosure, a cautious designation that reflects how much the original form had already been obscured. The stone spread across the wall ranges from four to eight metres wide, and the surviving height, both inside and out, barely reaches a metre. Two later trackways cross the cashel wall at the east and west, cutting through it as though it were simply another inconvenient obstacle. The site does not stand alone: a second enclosure lies about fifty metres to the south-east, another cashel roughly 120 metres beyond that, and a hut site approximately 140 metres to the west-south-west, suggesting that this was once a notably busy corner of the Clare landscape.

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Pete F
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