Ringfort (Cashel), Slievenaglasha, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
At six hundred feet above sea level on the northern slope of Slievenaglasha, a roughly circular enclosure sits in rough pasture, its stony bank worn low enough that a casual walker might step across it without a second thought.
What holds the attention, once you know what you are looking at, is a faint oval bloom of purple loosestrife in the western interior, a patch of colour that follows the ghost of some earlier feature beneath the ground, possibly a filled depression or the outline of a long-vanished structure. The plant grows where moisture gathers in subtly different soil, and in that sense the vegetation is doing a kind of quiet archaeology, marking something the eye alone would otherwise miss.
A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the drystone equivalent of the more familiar earthen rath, and this one measures roughly twenty metres east to west and eighteen metres north to south. The enclosing bank is about two metres wide, with external facing stones still visible along the eastern to southern arc, standing between twenty and sixty centimetres high. The northern and western sections have fared less well, partly because a later townland boundary wall, marking the division between this land and the townland of Teeskagh to the west, was built directly over the cashel wall along that stretch, cannibalising the earlier stonework for a more recent administrative purpose. The cashel sits within what has been identified as an extensive multiperiod field system on the same hillside, suggesting that this elevated terrace was managed and occupied across several distinct phases of use, though the cashel itself has not been closely dated.
The interior, despite the low and degraded bank, is generally level, and alongside the loosestrife the ground supports silverweed, black knapweed, red clover, nettle, eyebright, and dandelion, a plant community that often signals disturbed or formerly occupied ground. The wide views northward from this position are a reminder that placement on a commanding terrace was rarely accidental in early medieval Ireland, whether for reasons of display, defence, or simple practical oversight of the land below.