Ringfort (Cashel), Cloonbrien, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
What looks from the road like a modest clump of trees and scrub in a field of improved pasture near the Rathcannon townland boundary turns out, on closer inspection, to be the remains of an ancient enclosed settlement that has quietly persisted through centuries of agricultural change.
The monument sits in the Cloonbrien area of County Limerick, and the very fact that it survived the clearances and reconfigurations of Irish farmland at all gives it a particular kind of interest. Two further ringforts lie within half a kilometre, one roughly 420 metres to the north and another about 440 metres to the south-west, suggesting that this stretch of countryside was once considerably more densely occupied than its present pastoral appearance implies.
A ringfort, sometimes called a rath or cashel depending on its construction, is broadly a circular or near-circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank or a stone wall, used as a farmstead and place of shelter during the early medieval period in Ireland. This particular example carries the designation cashel, pointing toward stone construction rather than earthwork alone. The earliest cartographic record of it appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, where it is shown as a raised, roughly circular area. By the time the twenty-five-inch edition was surveyed in 1897, its outline had taken on a more polygonal character, with a diameter of approximately 28 metres. That later map also shows a field boundary running around it marked with a solid line, which may indicate the survival of a drystone wall, along with an external fosse, a defensive ditch, running from the north-east around through south to west. A gap about 8 metres wide at the west-north-west is considered a possible original entrance feature.
The monument sits in working farmland, so access would require landowner permission. Aerial photography from the Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophoto series taken between 2005 and 2012, as well as a Google Earth image dated September 2020, both show the site as a clearly tree and scrub-covered rise, which makes it easier to identify from a distance than many earthworks of this kind. The vegetation that obscures the detail of the structure at ground level is, paradoxically, also what has helped preserve it, discouraging ploughing and land improvement from encroaching on the interior. Visitors with an interest in early medieval settlement patterns would do well to note its position relative to the other two nearby ringforts, since the clustering of such sites often reflects the organisation of land and kinship in early Irish society rather than coincidence.