Ringfort (Cashel), Coad, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Coad, Co. Clare

In the dense hazel woodland of Coad in County Clare, a stone enclosure is slowly disappearing into the ground.

It is not dramatic about it. The walls have collapsed into a broad, low band of rubble, only six metres wide and less than a metre high, with facing-stones visible only in occasional glimpses through the overgrowth. The entrance, on the south-western side, measures just under two metres across and is barely perceptible now. This is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a dry-stone perimeter wall rather than an earthen bank and ditch, and this particular example sits on undulating, east-facing land that seems to have conspired with time to make it as inconspicuous as possible.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan of 1897 and again on the six-inch edition of 1920, marked in the conventional hachured style used to indicate earthworks and enclosures. By 1996, when it was listed in the Record of Monuments and Places, it had been reclassified simply as an "Enclosure", a designation that hints at how much detail had already been lost. The cashel's interior diameter runs to around 24.5 metres on a north-east to south-west axis, with an external diameter of roughly 36.5 metres, which would have made it a reasonably substantial structure in its time. At the centre there is a hut site, the likely remains of a dwelling that once stood within the protection of those walls. Later drystone field walls, built by people with no particular interest in archaeological preservation, run directly over the cashel's perimeter from south-west to north-east and again from north-east to south-east, further obscuring what little survives. About six metres south-west of the entrance sits a modern subrectangular cairn, roughly six metres long and a metre high, its origins and purpose unrecorded but its presence adding one more layer of ambiguity to a site that already has plenty.

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Pete F
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