Ringfort (Cashel), Crumlin, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Crumlin, Co. Clare

Squeezed onto a narrow strip of coastal pastureland in County Clare, with the rocky slopes of the Burren rising sharply to the south and Galway Bay sitting close to the north, this oval cashel occupies a position that feels almost accidental, as though the builders were working with whatever flat ground the landscape was prepared to offer.

A cashel is a type of ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one, measuring roughly 34 metres east to west and 28.5 metres north to south internally, is modest in scale but quietly complex in what it has accumulated over the centuries.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and recorded the site in 1901, describing it simply as "oval and overthrown", and while that assessment is fair enough, the remains reward a closer look. Facing stones survive in patches along the northern and western arc of the perimeter wall, rising to between half a metre and just over half a metre in height, while the interior is level and occupied in its north-eastern sector by a large stone cairn, ten metres long, five metres wide, and nearly a metre high, likely the collapsed material of the wall itself folded inward over time. At some later, unspecified point, a substantial field wall was built just outside the cashel's western perimeter, running parallel to it at a distance of less than three metres, borrowing the older structure's presence without much ceremony. Two hut sites, the remains of small enclosed dwelling platforms, lie just outside the cashel, one to the north-east and one to the south-west, suggesting that whatever activity centred on this place once extended well beyond the stone circuit itself. The site had already been mapped by the first Ordnance Survey in 1842, appearing again on the Cassini edition of 1915, so its outline has been a fixed point on the Clare coastline for well over a century and a half.

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Pete F
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