Ringfort (Cashel), Gortmore, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Gortmore, Co. Clare

What catches the eye at this cashel in Gortmore, County Clare, is not the enclosure itself so much as the effort that has gone into it.

A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and the wall here is substantial: over seven metres wide at its base, with large, well-arranged kerbstones facing outward on the exterior side, each up to 1.2 metres long and carefully set. The oval enclosure measures roughly 31 metres from northwest to southeast and 28 metres across the other axis, sitting on a south-southwest-facing slope in rough pasture. The interior, by contrast, tells a quieter story of later disturbance: someone quarried within the monument at some point, leaving a half-metre step down into the ground and a pile of loose stone heaped outside the wall to the southwest.

The site appears on all Ordnance Survey historic mapping as an oval enclosure, meaning it was already a visible and recognised feature of the landscape by the nineteenth century at the latest. The wall construction reveals a deliberate two-part design: the outer face is built with large, orderly kerbstones, while the interior face uses smaller, less precisely arranged stones. Much of the wall survives only as a sod-covered mound on its northwest side, and the gap on the west-northwest, about two metres wide, is thought likely to be a modern breach rather than an original entrance. A low, sinuous field boundary runs away from the northwest of the monument, and a high drystone wall stands just a metre to the east, partially obscuring the views that the slope would otherwise offer. A further enclosure sits approximately 47 metres to the northeast, suggesting this corner of Gortmore once held more organised activity than the current rough pasture implies.

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Pete F
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