Caherdoonteigusha, Murrooghtoohy, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
In the improved pasture of Murrooghtoohy, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits in a state of quiet erasure.
The cashel, a type of early Irish stone ringfort typically associated with early medieval farming settlements, measures approximately 27 metres across in both directions, which would once have made it a reasonably substantial structure. Today, a house occupies part of its northwestern arc, a septic tank has been dug into its southeastern interior, and generations of field clearance have deposited loose stone directly onto the enclosing wall until it is barely distinguishable from the landscape around it. The Aran Islands are visible to the west on a clear day, which at least suggests the people who originally built here chose their ground with some awareness of their surroundings.
The enclosure is defined partly by a surviving stone wall running from east to northwest, and partly by a scarp, a low earthen edge where the wall has all but dissolved back into the ground, continuing from northwest around to the east. A narrow gap on the south-southeast side, flanked by two short modern drystone additions, may mark the position of the original entrance, and a few outer facing-stones are still visible just to its west, hinting at the more deliberate construction that once stood here. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted the site in publications from 1900, 1901, and 1915, which places it within the broader tradition of late Victorian and Edwardian fieldwork that attempted to document the ring-forts and cashels of Clare before agricultural change made that task still more difficult.