Ringfort (Cashel), Craggagh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
About two hundred metres from the shoreline at Craggagh in County Clare, a low circular wall sits on a slight rise in an otherwise relentlessly rocky landscape.
It is easy to read the place as simply another field boundary, and that is precisely what makes it worth a second look. This is a cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically associated with the early medieval period. Unlike the earthen ringforts found in softer ground elsewhere in Ireland, cashels are built from drystone, their walls raised without mortar, and this one still retains sections of both inner and outer facing stones, the carefully laid vertical surfaces that once gave the enclosure its structural definition.
The cashel measures roughly twenty-two metres east to west and twenty-one and a half metres north to south internally, making it a fairly typical example of the form. Its enclosing wall is now reduced to between a quarter of a metre and just under a metre in height depending on where you look, with the better-preserved facing visible at the north, south-west, and around the north-western arc. A gap of about two and a quarter metres at the east-south-east may mark the original entrance. What is particularly interesting here is a feature along the south-eastern to southern exterior: an overgrown trench, one to one point two metres deep and two to three metres wide, that gives the impression of a fosse, the defensive ditch sometimes cut around fortified enclosures. Whether it was deliberately dug or is a consequence of later disturbance is not entirely clear, but its presence adds a layer of complexity to what might otherwise seem a straightforward site. Quantities of small stones scattered along the inner southern arc may represent the collapse of an internal wall structure. The 1915 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the enclosure through a curved boundary line, suggesting it was recognisable even then as something distinct from ordinary field division. Some of the field walls that now abut the cashel at the north-north-east, south, and north-west may themselves be contemporary with the original construction, a reminder that early medieval farming landscapes were often more organised and enduring than the centuries since have made them appear.