Ringfort (Cashel), Eanty More, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
A circular stone enclosure sitting at the western edge of a karst plateau in County Clare, roughly 45 metres from a steep ravine drop, is not the kind of site that announces itself.
This cashel, a type of ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, measures just over 25 metres in external diameter, and its double-faced stone wall survives well enough on the outer face to be traced almost continuously around the circuit. The best-preserved sections, standing between 0.8 and 1.6 metres high, run from the north-west around to the north-east. The inner wall-face has fared less well, and a gap of roughly two metres at the south-east is thought to be a modern intrusion, given the absence of stone lining at that point.
The cashel sits within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it carries traces of agricultural organisation from more than one period of use, layers of enclosure and boundary-making accumulating over centuries. The site was already being mapped by the late nineteenth century, appearing on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan of 1897 and again on the six-inch edition of 1920. One detail inside the enclosure that belongs entirely to the geology rather than to human construction is a gryke running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west just off-centre. A gryke is a fissure formed when slightly acidic rainwater dissolves the joints in limestone bedrock, a common feature of the Burren's karst terrain, and this one runs for six metres, a metre wide, and drops to a maximum depth of 0.6 metres, now filled with loose stones and grass. Field walls have been built off the cashel itself to the north-north-west and north, and another wall curves around it from east to south, suggesting the structure was incorporated into the working landscape long after whatever community originally built it had gone. Two further cashels lie within 200 metres, one about 98 metres to the north-north-east and another roughly 187 metres to the south-east, along with a separate enclosure to the east-south-east, making this part of Eanty More unusually dense with early settlement remains.
