Caherreagh, Caherkinallia, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
What looks, at first glance, like a collapsed field boundary on an east-facing Clare hillside turns out to be something considerably older and stranger.
Set at the end of an east-west ridge above cut-away bog and rough pasture, this stone enclosure sits where the ground drops away steeply on three sides, opening out to broad views over rock outcrop, woodland, and conifer plantations. Its Irish name, Caherreagh, points to its origins: a caher, or cashel, is a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure, typically circular, built as a defended farmstead or settlement.
When the Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1842, Caherreagh was recorded as a roughly circular enclosure with an estimated maximum diameter of around 33 metres, and the same name and form appear again on the Cassini edition of the map in 1920. Since then, the monument has shifted considerably from that original shape. The wall, built in the dry-stone tradition without mortar, has largely collapsed at the north and northeast, and the enclosure now reads as pear-shaped rather than circular, measuring about 30.5 metres northwest to southeast and 25 metres across. At the northwest, the wall pushes outward to form a subtriangular annexe, though a low rise in the ground there suggests this addition came later than the main structure, with the original enclosing line traceable as a low bank running across its inner side. Inside the perimeter, the floor is karstic limestone pavement, the bare, fissured rock characteristic of the Burren, covered only by a thin skin of soil and scattered with loose slabs and boulders. Two upright slabs still project from the ground at the east and south. Loose stone lying around the base of the outer wall may represent material cleared from the interior at some later date, or it may simply be the original wall gradually returning to the ground. About 118 metres to the west lies a second enclosure, suggesting this part of the ridge was more intensively used in the past than its present emptiness implies.
One detail that sits outside the archaeological record is the presence of a lone bush in the southeast sector, which local tradition regards as significant. In Irish rural culture, solitary thorns growing within or near old enclosures were often treated with considerable caution, associated with the otherworld and left undisturbed even when the land around them was cleared or farmed. That this one is still noted, and still standing, says something about the persistence of certain kinds of knowledge in a landscape that can look, to an outside eye, like it has been entirely forgotten.