Ringfort (Cashel), Clooneen, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Clooneen, Co. Clare

At the southern edge of an east-west ravine in County Clare, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits on high pastureland, its entrance long since lost to collapse and conjecture.

What makes this cashel, a type of ringfort built from unmortared drystone walling rather than an earthen bank, quietly unusual is not any single feature but a combination: the flat-topped mound it encloses, the evidence of a later defensive wall added around the original, and the fact that two further cashels sit within a hundred metres of it, suggesting this was once a notably busy corner of the early medieval landscape.

The structure measures approximately 33 metres east to west and 32.4 metres north to south, making it a substantial enclosure. At some point after the original cashel wall was raised, a second outer wall, around 1.7 metres wide, was added just beyond it, a modification that implies either a change in the site's function or a heightened concern for security. Both walls remain partially visible, with surviving sections reaching up to a metre in height. Inside, the enclosed mound is eroded around its edges but rises between 1.4 and 1.8 metres above the surrounding ground; at its northern end it climbs to 3.6 metres, suggesting the interior was never simply flat open ground. No entrance has been identified with certainty, though a concentration of fallen stonework along the eastern perimeter hints at where one may have been. The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1840 and 1916, marked with hachures that indicate an earthwork, and it sits within a wider field system that adds further texture to the agricultural history of the area. The two neighbouring cashels, one roughly 48 metres to the south-southeast and another about 80 metres to the west, raise the possibility that this cluster of enclosures once formed part of a connected settlement or landholding, perhaps belonging to related families or a single extended household spread across adjoining plots.

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