Ringfort (Cashel), Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare

At the south-eastern corner of a blackthorn-covered plateau in County Clare, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits close to the edge of a drop of around ten metres, with steep slopes falling away to the east and south.

It is not the kind of site that announces itself. The wall, where it survives at all, appears as a low bank of tumbled stone, about three metres wide and half a metre high, and only along one arc, from north-east to south-west, do the original courses remain visible: large, horizontally laid stones that hint at the construction method once used across the whole perimeter.

The site is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks. Cashels were typically used as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, protecting livestock and a household within a defensible stone circuit. This one measures roughly twenty metres across and is now poorly preserved, its fabric long since collapsed or robbed for other uses. What makes the location quietly notable is not the cashel in isolation but its relationship to the landscape: the plateau edge would have provided natural defence on two sides, and a second cashel of the same type lies just seventy-five metres to the north-east, suggesting this corner of Clare once supported a cluster of enclosed settlements in close proximity to one another.

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Pete F
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