Ringfort (Cashel), Tullycommon, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Tullycommon, Co. Clare

On a high spur at around 600 feet above sea level on the borders of the Burren in County Clare, a circular stone ringfort sits in rough pasture overlooking terraced valley slopes.

What makes it quietly compelling is not what survives but what comparison reveals: the gap between the monument as it was recorded in 1905 and the considerably diminished structure that remained when it was inspected again nearly a century later.

A cashel, to use the Irish term, is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one originally enclosed a circular interior roughly 20 metres across. When the antiquarian T. J. Westropp visited in 1905 and wrote up his findings in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, he described the wall as very neatly built, about 3 metres wide and standing up to 1.5 metres high, with a slight inward lean, or batter, to its face. He noted a barely traceable entrance at the east-south-east, a semi-circular hut foundation pressed against the inner wall to the south, and a second curving wall foundation close by. By 1999, the wall had lost considerable height and width, its inner face almost entirely buried under collapsed stonework. No entrance was discernible at the east-south-east, and hollows pocking the wall all around its circuit, unmentioned by Westropp, point to systematic later removal of building stone. The internal features, on closer inspection, appeared to post-date the cashel's original use rather than belong to it. The monument had also been mapped on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets of 1842 and again on the Cassini edition of 1920, so its steady decline falls within a documented record spanning nearly two centuries.

The cashel does not sit in isolation. It lies within an extensive field system of multiple periods, and within roughly 75 metres to the north-east there is both a cairn and a hut site, suggesting this spur was occupied and worked across a long span of time. Later field walls abut the cashel exterior at the north-west and south-south-west, evidence that the structure was absorbed into a working agricultural landscape long after whatever household or community first raised it had gone.

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