Gleninsheen Caher, Gleninsheen, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
Most stone enclosures of early medieval Ireland are roughly circular, so there is something immediately arresting about a cashel, or stone-walled fort, laid out in a rectangle.
This one sits on the high west-facing slopes of a karst hill in the Burren, under rough pasture, commanding open views across a broad arc from south-southwest to north. A cashel is a drystone enclosure, typically associated with early medieval settlement, and the rectangular form here gives the interior a more deliberate, almost architectural quality than the round examples that dot the wider landscape. It measures forty metres north to south and thirty-six metres east to west internally, with an entrance near the eastern end of the north wall that retains its original stone facing to a height of one metre and a width of nearly two metres. Patches of original outer facing survive elsewhere along the north and east walls, though much of the perimeter has been collapsed, robbed for building material, and rebuilt at various points.
The enclosure was recorded and named on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1916, so it has been a recognised feature of the local landscape for at least that long. Within the walls, the archaeology is layered and not easily untangled. The remains of a possible house sit east of centre, and a hut site occupies the interior near the west wall. Two further hut sites in the northwest corner preserve remnants of older structures beneath more recent stonework, pointing to continued use of the space across different periods. Another hut site fills the southeast corner, and one located just six metres north of the entrance is thought to be modern. The whole enclosure sits within a multiperiod field system, suggesting that farming activity here stretches back considerably further than any single phase of construction.