Ringfort (Cashel), Caherminnaun, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Caherminnaun, Co. Clare

At Caherminnaun in County Clare, an early medieval cashel sits in working pasture, its ancient fabric quietly entangled with the practical needs of later centuries.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the Irish equivalent of the more familiar earthen rath, and this one has had a complicated afterlife. Rather than being left as a ruin, it has been repeatedly repurposed, its original stonework used as a foundation for a more recent drystone wall, and part of its southern edge reshaped into a platform, roughly six metres long and three metres wide, at some point in the relatively recent past.

The structure is roughly square in plan, measuring just under thirty metres on each side, and it sits at the southern edge of an undulating plateau that tilts away to the east and south. The defining feature is a broad spread of stone, somewhere between five and six metres wide, which survives to an internal height of about a metre. Onto this spread, a later drystone wall has been constructed, though not uniformly. The eastern side of that wall is noticeably more solid, around two metres wide and a metre high, while the walls on the other sides are considerably thinner and less carefully built, only about eighty centimetres wide and sixty centimetres tall. Some of the stone in the spread appears to be field clearance rather than original structural material, meaning that centuries of farming have added to, and confused, what the early medieval builders left behind. The cashel sits within a large multiperiod field system, suggesting that this landscape has been continuously farmed and reorganised across many different eras, each generation working around, or directly on top of, what earlier people built. A related enclosure lies roughly 190 metres to the west.

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