Ringfort (Cashel), Carrowclogh, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Carrowclogh, Co. Limerick

Somewhere on an elevated limestone crag in Carrowclogh, a circular enclosure sits swallowed by thorn bushes and bramble, its ancient stonework largely invisible to anyone who happens to pass along the road below.

The site is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and though it appears on the 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a clearly defined circular embanked enclosure of roughly twenty metres in diameter, reaching it today is another matter entirely.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the site in 1916 to 1917, noting that it was already "greatly defaced" at that point, with only a foundation of large blocks remaining, each running between three and four feet in length. Ringforts, which were typically farmstead enclosures built during the early medieval period in Ireland, survive in many thousands across the country, but cashels of this kind, using the limestone that lies so readily to hand in parts of Limerick, represent a regionally distinct form of the type. By the time Westropp visited, the structural integrity was already compromised; a century on, the vegetation has done further work.

The monument sits immediately to the north-east of a derelict thatched roadside cottage, itself worth noting as a slowly disappearing feature of the rural Irish landscape. Any attempt to locate the cashel itself will be frustrated by the dense cover of scrub, and there is no formal access. The site is, in the blunt assessment recorded in the monument notes, now inaccessible. What a visitor can do is register its presence on the map, observe the limestone terrain that made such construction practical, and consider how thoroughly a scheduled monument can be absorbed back into the landscape when left unmanaged over the course of a century.

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Pete F
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