Ringfort (Cashel), Cahergrillaun, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Cahergrillaun, Co. Clare

On the eastern side of Eanty Valley in County Clare, a low knoll near the top of a west-facing slope holds something easy to walk past without recognising for what it is.

What survives here is a cashel, a type of early medieval ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, and what makes this one quietly arresting is how little of it remains visible above the ground yet how legible its original form still is. The enclosing wall, once double-faced and somewhere between one and a half and two and a half metres wide, now barely clears ankle height in places, but it still traces a near-complete subcircular outline roughly seventeen metres across. The land drops away to the west and north, which would have given whoever lived here a clear view over the valley below.

The site appears on Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and again in the 1920 edition, suggesting it was already a recognisable feature of the landscape well before anyone thought to classify it formally. It was eventually catalogued as an enclosure in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. Inside the cashel wall, the ground slopes from the north-west down toward the south-east, and just north of centre there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement, possibly used for storage or as a place of refuge. A small earthen mound, only about twenty centimetres high, sits to the south of the souterrain entrance. Whether that mound is incidental or connected to the original use of the interior is not recorded, but its presence adds a further layer to what is already a more complex site than the surviving stonework alone would suggest.

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Pete F
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