Ringfort (Cashel), Erinagh More, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Erinagh More, Co. Clare

In a forested corner of Erinagh More in County Clare, a roughly circular enclosure sits quietly at a slightly lower level than the ground beside it, its edges defined not by dramatic walls but by a gentle drop in the earth and a scattering of tumbled stone.

What makes the site particularly curious is that it never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard reference for recording landscape features across Ireland for well over a century. Something was here, in use long enough to leave a clear impression on the ground, and yet cartographers either missed it or had no occasion to mark it.

The enclosure belongs to a class of monument known as a cashel, a type of ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank. This example measures roughly 19.6 metres across from east to west and 17.5 metres north to south, and it sits immediately to the east of a neighbouring cashel, the two structures conjoined. The interior is now grass and scrub, but the perimeter retains the remains of a drystone wall along the north-west to south-east arc, with stone spreads elsewhere suggesting the wall once ran further around. Where enough survives to take a measurement, the original wall width appears to have been between 1.4 metres at the north-north-east and 1.8 metres at the south, dimensions consistent with a solidly built enclosure rather than a token boundary. A slight internal scarp, dropping around 0.9 metres from west to east, and a corresponding external scarp of about 0.8 metres on the eastern side, give the site its legible shape even in its worn condition. Animal tracks crossing the perimeter at the north-north-east and south-east are a reminder that the enclosure is still in use, if not quite in the way its builders intended.

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Pete F
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