Ringfort (Cashel), Caherminnaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
What makes this particular cashel in County Clare quietly arresting is not its size or preservation, but the sheer accumulation of uses that different communities found for it across many centuries.
A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement common in early medieval Ireland, typically built to protect a farmstead and its occupants. This one, sitting on a gentle rise in undulating pasture with open views stretching from south to north, has long since shed any clear memory of its original purpose. In its place, it has gathered a children's burial ground, a cairn of uncertain date, a possible standing stone, and the ghostly outline of a church that no longer stands.
The cashel itself is poorly preserved. Its roughly circular wall, somewhere between 1.75 metres thick and now standing only 0.4 to 0.8 metres high, can still be traced around its outer face, though the inner face has largely collapsed flush with the interior. The enclosed area measures just under 31 metres east to west and just under 30 metres north to south. At the southern side, a cairn of loose stone overlies the wall, and from it protrudes an upright stone 1.25 metres tall, inclined slightly to the east; nearby lies a large flat stone, curved at one end, which may once have stood upright beside it. This cairn appears to post-date the cashel itself and may be connected to the children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, that occupies the south-west of the interior. A cillín was a place set apart for the burial of unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, often located at the margins of older, half-remembered sacred sites. Within the south-east sector there is also a cist, a stone-lined grave of much earlier origin. Early Ordnance Survey mapping from 1842 marked the site as the location of Kilcameen Church, labelled on later maps as Cill Chaimín, though by the 1920 edition this had been reduced to a "site of" symbol within a roughly rectangular graveyard. Tim Robinson's map of 1977 preserves the Irish place-name. About 34 metres to the south lies a holy well, and roughly 220 metres to the east stands Caherballykinvarga, one of the better-known cashels in the Burren. The field system surrounding this site has its own long and layered history, with evidence of activity from multiple periods.