Ringfort (Cashel), Poulacarran, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Poulacarran, Co. Clare

On the floor of Poulacarran Valley in County Clare, half-swallowed by hazel wood and sitting at the western edge of a ravine that drops roughly five metres, there is a cashel whose entrance still carries the marks of whoever last walked through it with purpose.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that early medieval Irish families built to define their territory and protect their livestock. This one is nearly circular, measuring just over twenty metres east to west, and its outer wall-face, built from horizontally laid stones, still stands between one and two metres high on the northern and eastern sides. The entrance passage, less than a metre wide, is lined with upright stone slabs that reach to around one and a half metres in height. It is a tight, deliberate threshold.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1898 and made careful notes. He recorded a fallen lintel at the entrance, a substantial slab measuring 1.72 metres long and nearly half a metre thick, suggesting the original doorway was properly roofed. He also described an annexe enclosure adjoining the cashel to the north, and mentioned what he called a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or as a place of refuge. When Robinson noted the site in 1977, the souterrain was still being recorded. But when the structure was inspected again in 1997, neither the annexe nor any souterrain could be identified. Whether they had collapsed, been buried under accumulated stone spill, or were never quite what they appeared, is not resolved. Much of the inner wall-face and the lower outer courses are now obscured by exactly that kind of spread rubble, widening the wall's footprint to between three and four and a half metres in places. The cashel appears on both the 1842 and 1920 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked with the hachuring that surveyors used to indicate an earthwork or enclosure, which means it was a recognised feature of the valley long before anyone thought to measure it closely.

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