Ringfort (Cashel), Commons, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Commons, Co. Clare

What makes this enclosure quietly puzzling is that surveyors could not quite agree on its shape.

When the Ordnance Survey first mapped this part of Co. Clare in 1842, they recorded it as a circular enclosure; by 1897 their more detailed 25-inch plan showed it as subrectangular, and later editions followed suit. The discrepancy is not simply a matter of cartographic improvement. It points to something genuinely ambiguous on the ground, a structure whose form sits between the categories we use to classify early Irish settlement.

The site is a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort, sitting above the 500-foot contour on the eastern edge of an exposed limestone plateau in Commons townland. Its outer dimensions run to roughly 34 metres north-northeast to south-southwest and 30 metres in the other direction, with walls averaging around 85 centimetres wide. The construction varies considerably as you move around the perimeter. The eastern wall, built from rough, undressed flat slabs, meets a steep natural drop of nearly two metres on its outer face, giving that side a pronounced defensive feel. The southern wall retains both inner and outer facing stones, and a gap where large flags have fallen away hints at a possible original entrance, stone-lined in the early medieval manner, though one upright stone nearby looks to be a later intrusion. A collapsed field wall overlies the northern side, testament to centuries of the site being absorbed into ordinary farming. Inside, the flat, grass-covered interior holds two small livestock pens tucked into the northwest corner, already labelled as sheepfolds on the 1897 map, suggesting the cashel had long been repurposed for agricultural use by the time anyone thought to record it properly. A low internal wall about ten metres long runs through the southern centre, and further field walls radiate outward from each corner of the enclosure. Roughly 53 metres to the south-southwest lies a cairn, and about 69 metres to the southwest sits a hut site, suggesting this was once a small cluster of early settlement rather than an isolated structure.

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Pete F
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