Caherlissaniska, Eantybeg, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
On the edge of a limestone plateau in County Clare, a suboval cashel sits on a karst knoll barely covered by grass, with the ground dropping almost vertically some fifteen metres into a valley to the east and falling steeply away to the south.
A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval date, built for settlement or as a farmstead enclosure, and this one, known in Irish as Cathair Lios an Uisce, roughly translates as the stone fort of the water enclosure. It measures roughly 28 metres north to south and nearly 23 metres east to west, and it sits not in isolation but within a sprawling, multi-period field system that suggests this landscape was organised and worked across many generations.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and recorded the site in 1911, and his observations remain the most detailed we have. He noted that the outer wall-face was built of what he called good, coarse work, with a distinctive vertical join at the south-west. The wall itself is between 1.7 and 2 metres wide and stands between 1 and 2 metres high, though the inner face is now largely buried beneath a slumped bank of rubble. At the south-south-west, the original entrance survives in partial form: the east pier of the gateway was still intact when Westropp visited, and the probable lintel, a substantial stone roughly 2 metres long, lay on the ground beside it. A later drystone field wall, the kind of practical reuse common across the Burren, has been built along the top of the cashel's outer face. Westropp also described a rough gap in the northern wall giving access to an annexe enclosure, though this feature was no longer visible when the site was inspected in 1998. To the south-west, the walls of a probable contemporary field survive alongside a hut site, while a megalithic structure lies around 52 metres to the north, and two further cashels sit within a few hundred metres in either direction, one to the north-east and one to the west-south-west. This is not a single monument but a fragment of a much denser, layered settlement landscape, most of it still underfoot.
