Caherlissananima, Eanty More, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ringforts

Caherlissananima, Eanty More, Co. Clare

Perched at the edge of a cliff in the Burren, this early medieval stone enclosure takes its Irish name, Cathair Lios an Anama, and sits where the rock itself becomes the fortification.

A cashel is a drystone ringfort, typically circular or subcircular, built during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead or residence. This one, roughly twenty-one metres north to south and just over twenty metres east to west, occupies a high outcrop above a valley, with cliffs falling away immediately to the south and west. The walls, where they survive to between half a metre and one metre in height, are built from massive stones, some reaching one and a half metres in length. A lintel stone lies on the ground just outside the narrow south-east entrance, displaced from the position it still held when the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp sketched it in 1899. A short curved wall beyond the entrance, and a separate north-south wall closer to the cliff edge at the south-west, both appear to have served defensive purposes, with a depression near the centre of the latter possibly the lower remnant of an embrasure, an angled opening designed to allow observation or projection outward while limiting exposure.

Inside the cashel, the terrain is anything but flat. The floor slopes almost two metres from south-west to north-east, and the underlying limestone is fractured by grykes, the natural fissures characteristic of karst terrain. One large subrectangular hollow at the north of the interior, together with a channel extending southward from it, may represent a point where stone was quarried directly from the bedrock, perhaps to supplement or repair the enclosure wall itself. A narrower gryke runs north from the eastern interior, passing beneath the wall, though it is too shallow to be a souterrain, the kind of underground stone-lined passage sometimes found associated with ringforts and used for storage or refuge. House foundations survive in the southern interior, suggesting that domestic structures once stood within the enclosure. A steep path, deliberately cut into the rocky slope to the south, links the cashel to the valley below. Another cashel stands roughly two hundred and sixteen metres to the west-south-west, hinting that this part of Eanty More was once a more densely settled landscape than its bare and windswept appearance now suggests.

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