Ringfort (Cashel), Coolmeen, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Coolmeen, Co. Clare

On a flat, wind-scoured patch of good grazing land in County Clare, surrounded by the kind of rocky, unforgiving terrain that characterises much of the Burren's fringes, a circular stone enclosure sits in quiet contradiction to its surroundings.

The grass here is unusually lush, which may well explain why someone chose this particular spot, centuries ago, to build a cashel, the term used for a ringfort constructed from drystone walling rather than the earthen banks more common elsewhere in Ireland.

The cashel measures 21 metres across in both directions, making it a near-perfect circle, defined by a drystone wall between 1.6 and 2.5 metres wide. The wall has worn low over the centuries, standing only around 0.3 to 0.4 metres on the interior and up to a metre on the exterior, but its original outer face is still traceable. It was mapped as far back as the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map and again on the 1915 revision, recorded both times with hachuring, the cartographic shorthand for an earthwork or enclosure. What makes the site more than just a simple circular enclosure is the arrangement of structures clustered around its walls. An oval structure, roughly 7.2 by 4.5 metres, is built against the interior of the cashel wall at the west-northwest and appears to spill beyond it. A separate circular structure sits just outside the wall to the south-southwest, measuring approximately 5.4 by 4.3 metres. Later field walls have also been built directly against the cashel at the west, east, and south-southeast, suggesting the enclosure continued to organise the working landscape long after its original use had passed.

From the air, the relationship between these overlapping structures becomes clearer, the cashel wall acting almost as a spine around which later additions and agricultural boundaries accumulated over time. On the ground, the site rewards a slow circuit, particularly to trace where the oval interior structure bleeds through the perimeter wall and where successive generations have borrowed the ancient stonework as a ready-made field boundary.

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Pete F
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