Ringfort (Cashel), Carran, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Carran, Co. Clare

What looks, at first glance, like a low ring of collapsed limestone rubble on a scrub-covered rise near Carran turns out to be something considerably more layered.

This is a cashel, a type of early medieval ringfort built entirely from stone rather than earth and timber, and what defines it now is less a standing wall than a wide spread of tumbled masonry, between five and a half and seven metres across, that traces the outline of the original enclosure. The outer wall-face, probably rebuilt at some point, remains legible along much of its western and south-western arc; the inner face holds its ground only on the east side. A gryke, one of the deep natural fissures that split the Burren's limestone pavement, runs north to south immediately west of the site, roughly ten metres wide and up to two metres deep, giving the immediate landscape the slightly fractured quality that characterises so much of this part of Clare.

The cashel appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1920, marked with hachuring that indicates a raised or enclosed feature, so its presence has been documented for the better part of two centuries. Its roughly subcircular plan measures about 29.6 metres north to south and 27.15 metres east to west. At the southern side there was once a lintelled entranceway, just over a metre wide, but this had already collapsed by the 1930s, when it was noted by a researcher named Wallace in 1933. Inside the enclosure, the ground rises toward the north into a stony circular mound, somewhere between eight and ten metres across and standing about 1.3 metres high. On top of this mound sits a modern ring of loosely arranged stones, which may correspond to what Wallace described as hut sites. Just to the south-east of the mound there is a possible souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind often associated with early medieval settlement, used variously for storage, refuge, or both. An old wall connects this feature to the surrounding stone spread. Roughly thirty metres to the west lies another cashel, meaning the two enclosures would have sat within easy sight of one another, which raises quiet questions about how the two were related and what kind of community once occupied this particular corner of the Burren.

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