Ringfort (Cashel), Doonyvardan, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Doonyvardan, Co. Clare

On a raised patch of rough pasture in County Clare, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits quietly within a field system that has been worked and reworked across multiple periods of history.

By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1842, the cashel was already being recorded as an ordinary field, its ancient function absorbed into the working landscape around it. A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank and ditch, and this one measures approximately 30 metres east to west and 27.5 metres north to south, its enclosing wall still standing between half a metre and a metre high with a width of around 2.3 metres. Traces of inner and outer wall-facing survive in places, though later agricultural walls have been built across much of the original stonework, obscuring its earlier form.

What gives the structure a particular character are two surviving entrance gaps, each flanked by orthostats, the large upright stones used to line and define a passage. The eastern gap, just 0.6 metres wide, has an orthostat a metre tall on its northern side. The south-western gap is slightly wider at 1.1 metres and retains a shorter stone on its southern side. These modest details, easy to overlook, point to deliberate construction choices made when the enclosure was first built, most likely during the early medieval period, when cashels of this type served as enclosed farmsteads for prosperous farming families. Inside the western sector of the enclosure, the outline of a rectangular house site is still visible, a reminder that someone once lived within these walls, looking out across the same open ground that surrounds the site today.

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Pete F
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