Ringfort (Cashel), Leamaneh, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Leamaneh, Co. Clare

Folk memory, as recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Westropp in 1896, held that Caherscreebeen was once the richest fort in Ireland, its interior divided between a room of gold, a room of deer's tallow, and a third stocked with something recorded as "beor lochlanagh", or Dane's beer.

That is an unusually specific treasury for a field in County Clare, and the name alone, attached to a low grassy ring sitting on a south-facing ridge above a shallow east-west ravine near Leamaneh, gives the place a quality that purely archaeological description tends not to capture.

What survives on the ground is a cashel, a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, roughly circular at about 41.5 metres across its widest point. The wall is not a single structure but a two-phase construction: an inner face, now largely buried under its own collapse, and two successive outer faces, the outermost of which still stands between three and three and a half metres high around much of its circuit. The whole wall spreads to a width of nearly five metres in places. No original entrance is clearly legible, though both walls are lowest on the eastern side, which is the most likely location for one. Inside the cashel the ground level has risen to meet the tops of the surviving walls, the interior having filled in over the centuries. Westropp, visiting the site again around 1900 to 1902, noted traces of internal enclosures and what he described as two souterrains, underground stone-lined passages typically used for storage or refuge. Whether those two features represent one souterrain or two remains uncertain; later inspection in 1997 recorded only one, and the two "caves" marked on Westropp's 1913 plan sit close enough together to suggest they may be different sections of the same structure. A house site survives within the interior as well, partly overlain by one of four later field boundaries that were laid across the cashel garth at some point after the fort fell out of use.

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