Ringfort (Cashel), Eanty More, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Eanty More, Co. Clare

What remains of this early medieval enclosure at Eanty More is, by any honest measure, barely there.

The cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, has collapsed over centuries into a low grass-covered spread of rubble, its walls reduced to a gentle undulation across the pasture. Yet the outline is still readable: a roughly D-shaped form, approximately 24 metres north to south and just under 24 metres east to west, with a distinctive straight edge along the northern side. The southern arc of walling is noticeably narrower than the rest, only about 1.5 metres wide, while a stretch near the north end of the western side preserves enough original fabric to calculate that the wall was once 2.1 metres thick. That kind of precision, recoverable from what looks like little more than a grassy bank, is part of what makes such sites quietly compelling.

The cashel sits on a gently south-east-facing slope, about 20 metres from a ravine, and it does not stand in isolation. It forms part of a large multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it carries the accumulated marks of human activity across several distinct eras, not all of them contemporary with the cashel itself. Later drystone walls have been built directly over the northern perimeter and along the eastern side, folding the early medieval structure into a more recent agricultural arrangement. Outside the cashel, natural fissures in the limestone bedrock, known as grykes, run parallel to the western and northern walls, suggesting the enclosure was positioned and oriented with some awareness of the underlying karst topography. Several other enclosures lie within a few hundred metres, and a second cashel sits roughly 187 metres to the north-west, hinting at a broader pattern of early settlement across this part of County Clare. The site was identified from aerial imagery captured in 2000, which is often how such low-profile remains come to wider attention, their shapes only legible from above.

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