Lisharheen Caher, Lislarheenmore, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ringforts

Lisharheen Caher, Lislarheenmore, Co. Clare

A road runs straight through the middle of this ancient enclosure, and nobody thought to go around it.

That detail alone gives a sense of how thoroughly the structure at Lislarheenmore has been absorbed into the working landscape of the Caher valley over the centuries. What survives of the cashel, a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure used to define a farmstead or sometimes a monastic precinct, now reads largely as a low, grass-covered spread of stone, oval in plan and roughly thirty metres across its longer east-west axis. The outer facing-stones appear only intermittently, and there is no entrance that can be clearly identified. Clearance cairns, the piled field stones gathered over generations of farming, occupy much of the interior.

The site has been part of this landscape for long enough to appear by name on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1840 and again in the 1916 edition, where it is marked and labelled as Lislarheen Caher. It sits within what surveyors describe as a multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding walls, boundaries, and enclosures belong to different phases of occupation and use, layered across the hillside over a considerable stretch of time. The cashel itself is the oldest legible element in that palimpsest, though its precise date is not known. Later interventions are visible at several points: a wall of more recent construction follows the line of the northern arc of the enclosure, and a small rectangular hut presses against the outer face at the east-south-east. The small road that cuts through the eastern side, flanked by its own low stone walls, completes the picture of a structure gradually cannibalised by the needs of subsequent occupants.

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Pete F
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