Ringfort (Cashel), Coolnatullagh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
At the narrowest pinch of a valley on the eastern foot of Gortaclare Mountain in County Clare, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits on level ground, its walls so thoroughly collapsed and overgrown with hazel scrub that for much of the twentieth century it was recorded simply as an "enclosure", the kind of cautious label surveyors apply when a structure resists easy interpretation.
It appears on the 1915 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, marked with hachures that hint at its raised outline, but the site itself offers little away to a passing eye.
What it actually represents is a cashel, an Irish ringfort built from drystone rather than earthen banks, a construction tradition common across early medieval Ireland and particularly associated with the limestone-rich west. This example is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 14.3 metres north to south and 17.6 metres east to west internally. Its double-faced wall, built with both inner and outer courses of facing-stones and a rubble core between, survives to an exposed height of only about ten centimetres to sixty centimetres in most places, though the western section may preserve up to 1.8 metres beneath the accumulated collapse. That collapse, and dense hazel growth running from the western to the eastern arc, obscures the base of the walling almost entirely, and no trace of an original entrance remains visible. The interior, by contrast, is relatively open and shows no obvious features at ground level. The site sits within what appears to be an extensive and likely multiperiod field system, and a second enclosure lies approximately eighty metres to the north-north-west, suggesting this was once part of a broader, organised agricultural landscape rather than an isolated structure.
The valley setting itself is telling. Positioned at the middle and narrowest point of the valley floor, with the ground rising steeply to the west, the cashel occupies a location that would have controlled movement through a natural corridor in the terrain, a practical consideration that shaped where early farming communities chose to build and enclose.