Caherkiltaan, Kiltaan, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
On a south-west-facing slope in County Clare, a large roughly rectangular enclosure sits within rough pasture, its perimeter reduced over centuries to a low, flat-topped stony bank.
This is a cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort in which a circular or roughly circular wall enclosed a homestead or small settlement. At its widest the bank here runs nearly nine metres across, and the interior spans around twenty-five metres east to west. What makes it quietly puzzling is how much it has changed, and how much of what earlier observers recorded has since disappeared.
A local antiquarian named Thomas Johnson Westropp visited the site at the end of the nineteenth century and noted, at different points, "large, good masonry" and a "cross wall and some prostrate pillar stones" inside the enclosure. Neither feature is now visible. The masonry has gone, and the internal features are ambiguous: the cashel interior contains several grass-covered mounds of earth and occasional large stones arranged around shallow sunken areas, but whether these hollows are the result of quarrying, or whether they represent the same structures Westropp described in 1897, is uncertain. A researcher named Bowmer, writing in 2019, identified a possible house or hut site within the enclosure. The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as early as 1842, named Caherkiltaan, and again on the 1920 edition; Robinson's 1977 map gives the Irish form, Cathair Choillteáin. Later drystone field boundaries, the kind of low walls that crisscross the Burren landscape, have been built directly over the cashel's eastern and southern perimeter, making it harder still to read the original outline. Two further enclosures lie roughly 185 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting the site formed part of a broader, multi-period landscape of settlement and land use that has been accumulating and eroding here for a very long time.