Ringfort (Cashel), Cahermaan, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cahermaan, Co. Clare

What makes this cashel at Cahermaan quietly arresting is not any single dramatic feature but the way so much has survived, and how much of it still makes functional sense.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the type common across the west of Ireland where building in stone was more practical than earth and timber, and this one sits directly on the limestone pavement of the Burren, its low grassed-over walls rising only between 0.4 and 0.7 metres above the rock. It is rectangular rather than the more common circular plan, measuring roughly 41 metres east to west and nearly 35 metres north to south, and it sits within a wider field system that spans multiple periods of use, suggesting this landscape was organised and reorganised by successive generations over a very long stretch of time.

The interior rewards attention in its detail. Midway along the eastern wall, two upright stones mark an entrance just over a metre wide, their dimensions still carefully recorded: the northern stone stands 1.14 metres high, the southern just fractionally shorter at 1.06 metres. A later drystone field wall, taller and clearly of a different build, was constructed immediately outside this same eastern wall, which means the original entrance stones are now visible from inside rather than outside the cashel. From those threshold stones, a raised pathway, roughly 30 centimetres above the surrounding surface and tapering from about two metres at its base to one metre at the top, runs westward toward a rectangular structure at the centre of the enclosure. Against the western wall a second structure is visible, and tucked into the south-western angle is a small cell-like space measuring approximately 5 by 4.6 metres internally, a detail that hints at a more complex domestic or perhaps ecclesiastical arrangement within the enclosure than its modest walls might first suggest.

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Pete F
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