Ringfort (Cashel), Carrownahooan, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Carrownahooan, Co. Clare

In the boggy pasture of Carrownahooan, hemmed in on three sides by conifer plantations, a low grassy ridge traces the ghost of a wall that was once the boundary of an entire domestic world.

The structure is a cashel, a type of early medieval ringfort defined by a stone enclosure rather than an earthen bank, and this one has been sinking quietly into its surroundings for long enough that it now reads more as a gentle swell in the ground than a deliberate construction.

The cashel measures roughly 20 metres in diameter and sits on a gentle south-facing slope about 100 metres east of the Knocknaskeagh River. Its enclosing wall, where it survives, is grass-covered and spread with collapsed stone along its base, standing no more than 0.4 metres high and between 3 and 4 metres wide, dimensions that suggest something considerably more substantial once stood here. At the north-north-west, the stone gives way to an earthen bank, lower and narrower, which may reflect either a later modification or a different phase of construction. Inside, the ground is heavily overgrown, and a clearance cairn sits in the northern quadrant; a second cairn lies just outside the enclosure at the north-north-west. Clearance cairns are accumulations of stone gathered from fields to make the ground workable, and their presence here hints at agricultural activity associated with whoever occupied the site. The cashel appeared on Ordnance Survey maps of both 1840 and 1916, recorded simply as an enclosure, a designation that acknowledged its outline without quite capturing what it once was.

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Pete F
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