Ringfort (Cashel), Behagh, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Behagh, Co. Clare

At Behagh in County Clare, on the western summit of a low ridge, the remains of an early medieval cashel sit in a state of considerable disorder, its original form only just legible beneath centuries of agricultural reuse.

A cashel is a type of ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one once measured roughly 33 metres across internally. What survives today is a patchwork: short arcs of original facing-stones, a grassed-over stony bank, spreads of tumbled stone, and a later field wall that cuts directly across the eastern half of the interior as though the enclosure were simply not there.

The site appears on the 1842 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked as a circular enclosure approximately 45 metres in diameter, and again on the 1915 edition, this time with a concentric field boundary visible to the north-west and south-east. By that point, the cashel was already being absorbed into the working landscape around it. At some stage, a small shed measuring roughly four metres by four metres was constructed directly on the western wall line, a building apparently already present on the first edition OS map, suggesting this encroachment is not recent. The eastern half of the interior has been dug out to an average depth of nearly a metre, exposing a scarp face where stone is visible, though whether that stone is part of an original internal feature or simply the natural rock beneath is unclear. Most telling of all, the entire north-western arc of the cashel has been obscured by a later field wall built along the original inner face, with cleared field stones piled against it on the outside.

One detail pulls against all this disturbance. In the northern sector of the interior, a dense patch of vegetation roughly four metres by two metres may indicate the presence of a souterrain beneath the surface. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes used for storage or as a place of refuge. Whether one lies here remains unconfirmed, but the vegetation anomaly is the kind of quiet clue that keeps a site like this worth looking at closely, even when so much else has been lost to later use.

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Pete F
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