Promontory fort - inland, Burren, Co. Cavan

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Promontory fort – inland, Burren, Co. Cavan

Promontory forts are most commonly associated with dramatic coastal headlands, where the sea does the defensive work on three sides and a single wall closes off the landward approach.

This site in Burren, County Cavan, works on exactly the same logic, but the sea has been replaced by limestone. Sheer and stepped crags between four and fifteen metres high form the northern and western flanks of the enclosure, while a substantial curving drystone wall completes the circuit from east to west, sealing off the one side that nature left open. It is an arrangement that makes the distinction between architecture and geology genuinely difficult to unpick.

The enclosure is large and roughly sub-rectangular, measuring approximately 27 metres northwest to southeast and 23 metres southwest to northeast. The wall that anchors the man-made portion of the defences was originally somewhere between three and four and a half metres wide, a serious piece of construction built from a mixture of sandstone blocks and limestone karst flags. Sections of the outer façade are still legible, and the wall still stands up to 1.5 metres in places despite partial collapse and the growth of mature conifers along its course. Immediately outside the wall, a shallow depression running roughly southwest may be the remnant of a fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, and beyond that, peat-covered stones suggest a further outer wall once existed. On the clifftops themselves, scattered large stones point to the original presence of walls along both the northwestern crag and the northeastern cliff, though tree-fall on the western portion of the site has disturbed and possibly destroyed much of that evidence. The interior slopes gently westward and is now planted with mature forest, which obscures whatever features may once have been visible at ground level.

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