Ringfort (Cashel), Commons, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
Between 400 and 500 feet above sea level in County Clare, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits in open rough pasture, its walls reduced in places to little more than grass-covered ridges.
This is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built of stone rather than earth and timber, and what makes this one quietly interesting is not grandeur but accumulation: the site has been mapped, reused, built over, and quietly absorbed into the landscape across many centuries, leaving a structure that is as much a palimpsest as a monument.
The cashel measures approximately 45 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west internally, defined by a double-faced stone wall around a metre wide. The inner face is uneven, poorly constructed or broken along the north, built of uncoursed flagstones along the south, and appears to have been rebuilt at some point along the east. The outer face has survived less well, and at the west a later field wall, standing about a metre high, has been built directly over the cashel wall, suggesting that whoever raised it regarded the old structure simply as a convenient foundation. Inside, the ground slopes gently to the southeast, and a grass-covered internal dividing wall still runs across the eastern sector. Grass-covered field walls radiate outward from the cashel to the west-southwest and northwest, connecting it to a wider, multi-period field system that predates and postdates the enclosure itself. A possible second enclosure lies roughly 50 metres to the southwest. The site appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 and again on the Cassini edition of 1920, suggesting it was recognisable as a feature of the landscape long before anyone formally recorded it. An aerial photograph taken in March 2007 by Markus Casey, looking from the southeast, captures how thoroughly the structure has merged with its surroundings, the walls legible mainly as subtle changes in the grass.