Enclosure, Caheraderry, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Caheraderry, Co. Clare

On a gorse-covered hillock rising out of marshy pasture in County Clare, something circular and ancient quietly persists.

It is easy to miss, the vegetation long having claimed whatever clarity of outline it once had, but the underlying form is still there for those who look: a subcircular cashel, roughly 25 to 30 metres in diameter, its boundary now reduced to a low stone and earth scarp no more than 35 centimetres high. A cashel is a dry-stone ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement used across Ireland from the early medieval period, typically built to protect a farmstead and its inhabitants. Here, the enclosure sits at the summit of the hillock, a position that would have offered both drainage and visibility across the surrounding low ground.

What makes this site particularly interesting is the documentary thread running back almost two centuries. The enclosure appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1840 and 1916, marked with hachures indicating an earthwork, and with a small structure shown in the north-west quadrant of the interior. That structure may correspond to sections of drystone walling that remain visible today beneath the overgrowth, fragmentary but legible to a careful eye. The fact that the same features were recorded across two separate mapping exercises, more than seventy years apart, suggests the site was recognisable and largely intact well into the twentieth century, even as the surrounding land use shifted around it.

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Pete F
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