Caheremon, Ballykeel, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
By the time the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited Caheremon in 1900, he found little worth lingering over.
He described it as levelled to the field and of no great size, a dismissal that has proved fairly accurate. What survives today is a subcircular cashel, a type of early stone-walled enclosure associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, measuring roughly 32.5 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south. Its defining wall has collapsed and grassed over into a low bank barely 0.8 metres high, with only a faint remnant of inner stonework still legible on the western side. Elsewhere the wall has been reduced to little more than a scarp in the ground.
The site sits on a natural rise among undulating rock outcrops and pasture in County Clare, set within what appears to be a much larger and older field system spanning multiple periods of occupation and use. The name Caheremon, derived from the Irish cathair, meaning a stone fort or enclosure, was already established when the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1840, and the name reappears unchanged on the 1916 edition of the six-inch map. Inside the cashel, several long low banks of earth and stone run without any discernible pattern, possibly the degraded remains of internal structures or later agricultural activity. More recent activity has left its own traces too: visible concrete mixed into the rubble points to a modern shed that once stood here and has since been demolished. At the north-east the enclosure is clipped by a modern field boundary, one small indignity among several.
The site rewards a particular kind of attention, the kind that finds interest not in grandeur but in accumulation. Layers of use, from the original cashel builders to the farmers who raised a concrete shed inside the ruins, have compacted themselves into a low, quietly complex mound that is easy to walk past without a second glance.