Ringfort (Cashel), Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the drystone equivalent of the earthen raths found across Ireland, and the one sitting on the northern floor of Poulacarran valley in County Clare is an unusually well-preserved example of the type.
What makes it quietly remarkable is its shape: where most cashels are roughly circular, this one is rectangular, measuring roughly 45 metres on its longer axis and just over 33 metres on the shorter, a form that sets it apart from the great majority of its counterparts in the Burren landscape around it.
The walls are built from large, horizontally laid stones in a double-faced construction, meaning two parallel stone faces with rubble packed between them, and they survive to a maximum height of four metres on the northern side, though the southern stretch has been reduced to just one metre. The eastern wall has been further obscured by a later drystone field boundary laid directly over it, which speaks to the centuries of agricultural activity that continued around and on top of the structure long after its original purpose was forgotten. A spread of collapsed stone, roughly six and a half metres wide, outside the south-eastern corner suggests that a significantly taller section of wall once stood there before it gave way. Inside the enclosure, in the north-western corner, the remains of a subsidiary structure survive, their exact character not fully resolved. The site did not appear in formal records until 1996, when it was identified as a potential site from aerial photography, which means it slipped under the radar for much of the twentieth century despite sitting in open scrubland rather than being buried or obscured by later development.
The interior is now thick with ferns and grass, which gives the place the quality of somewhere that has been quietly getting on with things without much human interference. The wall collapse at the south-eastern corner and the overgrown interior make it somewhat easier to read as a ruin than as a former enclosure, but the northern wall, still standing at four metres, gives a clear sense of how substantial this structure once was.