Ringfort (Cashel), Pullagh, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Pullagh, Co. Clare

At the southern tip of the Slievecarran plateau in County Clare, a low oval wall barely rises above the grass, and the bedrock itself has been shaped into the boundary of an ancient enclosure.

This is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built from stone rather than earthworks, and here the distinction between human construction and natural landscape has grown almost impossible to read. The enclosure measures roughly 34 metres east to west and 25 metres north to south, its perimeter a grassed-over spread of stone on one side and a quarried lip of bedrock on the other, the whole thing sitting on a narrow shelf of rough grazing backed by a low cliff to the north.

What gives the site its quiet strangeness is how thoroughly it has merged with its setting. The southern boundary, where the terrace drops away, is formed not by built walling but by the bedrock edge itself, worked just enough to serve as a boundary. At the north-east, two large stones set at right angles to one another may indicate where an entrance once stood, though no clear gap survives in the wall line. The interior is level and featureless, offering no obvious clue as to what went on inside. Nearby, the wider landscape is equally layered: a hut site sits just seven metres to the north of the enclosure, and roughly 95 metres further north, just below the final rise to the plateau, lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or refuge. The cashel also sits within a multiperiod field system that extends across the surrounding area, suggesting that people were farming and living here across several distinct eras, each generation leaving its own faint mark on the same ground.

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Pete F
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