Caher, Doonnagore, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
On a west-facing slope in County Clare, a small ring of earth and stone sits in open pasture, commanding wide views across to the north-west.
It is modest enough that a walker might cross it without pausing, yet it carries a name, caher, that signals something older. A caher is a type of stone ringfort, typically a circular enclosure defined by a substantial dry-stone wall, and the word itself signals early medieval origins, when such structures served as enclosed farmsteads for farming families of some local standing. What survives here is considerably more subdued than that description might suggest.
The enclosure measures roughly 13 metres north to south and 12.5 metres east to west, making it a tight, almost circular space. Its boundary is formed partly by a low earth and stone bank, no more than 0.6 to 0.8 metres high on the outside and barely 0.2 metres above the interior ground level, and partly by a faint scarp on the south-east to south-south-west arc. Several large boulders rest on the western section of the bank, though these may be field-clearance material deposited there long after the original structure fell out of use. A later earthen field boundary cuts across the western part of the interior, running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, a reminder that the land has been worked and reworked across many centuries. The site was recorded as Caher on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1842, where an OS trigonometrical station at 339 feet above ordnance datum was marked in its southern sector, and it appeared again, with partial hachuring, on the Cassini edition of 1920. That two separate mapping exercises bothered to name it suggests the local memory of the place as something distinct from ordinary field boundaries remained intact well into the modern period, even as the structure itself had long since softened into the landscape.