Ringfort (Cashel), Doonnagore, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
On a rise in pasture at Doonnagore in County Clare, the land falls away steeply on all sides and the views open out broadly from west to north.
The structure at the top of this rise is a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort common in early medieval Ireland, and what makes this particular example quietly compelling is not its grandeur but its gradual dissolution. It is poorly preserved, yet precisely because of that, it reads almost like a diagram of how such a structure was built and how it fails over time.
What survives runs in two distinct arcs. From north-north-east to west-south-west, the boundary is now little more than a steep scarp, a cut in the ground between roughly 0.4 and 1 metre high. The more substantial arc runs the other way, where the footings of a double-faced stone wall, estimated at around 2 metres wide and still standing roughly 1 metre high externally, can be traced. Outside this wall is a berm, a narrow flat shelf of ground, and beyond that another low scarp. The builders appear to have added this berm and outer scarp deliberately, most likely to stabilise the wall against erosion on what is the steepest part of the slope. Scattered around this section are the sparse remains of collapsed stone revetting and flat foundation slabs, along with a spread of tumbled stone running 1 to 2 metres downhill. At some later point, a drystone wall was laid directly over the inner face of the cashel wall, repurposing the old boundary for more ordinary agricultural use. Inside the enclosure, the ground rises to a slight crown at the centre before dropping away by about a metre toward the perimeter. In the northern half of the interior, there is a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement, used variously for storage, refuge, or both.