Ringfort (Cashel), Cloonselherny, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cloonselherny, Co. Clare

At first glance, this low-lying field in Cloonselherny looks like ordinary improved pasture, the kind that covers much of County Clare.

Look more carefully at the slight rise in the ground, the faint curve of a grassed-over stone spread, and the gentle scarp that traces an arc across the landscape, and something older begins to emerge. Embedded within it, according to both the 1842 and 1915 editions of the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps, is a children's burial ground, the kind of informal unconsecrated cemetery known in Irish as a cillín, where unbaptised infants were quietly interred outside the rites of the official Church. The combination of an early medieval enclosure and a post-Reformation burial practice layered inside it gives this otherwise unremarkable patch of ground an unusual density of use across the centuries.

The site is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and it sits on the level crest of a low north-south ridge. Its oval interior measures roughly 29 metres east to west and 26 metres north to south, dimensions consistent with a single farmstead enclosure of the early medieval period, when such structures were the standard unit of rural settlement across Ireland. What survives of the enclosing wall is modest: a spread of stone, grassed over and partially buried, between roughly three and five and a half metres wide and only twenty to fifty centimetres high. A later field wall, considerably narrower, was built directly on top of this spread at some point, effectively cannibalising the older structure for convenience. From the south-east round to the west, where the stone spread gives out, a low scarp takes over as the only legible boundary. The field boundaries to the south have since been removed entirely, further softening whatever shape the site once held in the landscape.

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Pete F
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