Ringfort (Cashel), Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
At the northern edge of a plateau above Poulacarran Valley in County Clare, a roughly rectangular enclosure of dry-laid stone sits half-buried in hazel scrub and rough pasture.
What looks at first glance like a collapsed field boundary is in fact a cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, and it has been accumulating layers of history, quite literally, for well over a millennium.
The cashel measures approximately 26 metres north to south and 23 metres east to west, with rounded corners and a perimeter wall built from large, flat-laid stones, some up to a metre in length, arranged in random courses rather than regular dressed masonry. The outer face can still be traced all the way around, though both inner and outer faces are heavily obscured by stone spill, the accumulated debris of collapse, spread up to seven metres wide in places. When the antiquarian T. J. Westropp examined the site in 1898, he dismissed it as a "coarse thin ring-wall," but closer inspection reveals something more interesting: a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used for storage or refuge, is built directly within the wall fabric near the western end of the north side. The site has also been subject to later interference. A drystone field wall, perhaps a metre high, was constructed directly over the old cashel perimeter, and at the west, where the original wall had collapsed, this later wall curves inward to occupy the interior. A building of uncertain date overlies the interior spill on the northern side, adding another unresolved chapter to the sequence.
The land drops steeply to the north and more gently to the west, a positioning that would have given the original enclosure a clear outlook across the valley below. That defensive logic, combined with the concealed souterrain and the sheer scale of the stonework, suggests this was a site of some significance to whoever built and used it, even if subsequent centuries have blurred the details considerably.