Ringfort (Cashel), Eantybeg, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Eantybeg, Co. Clare

On a promontory in County Clare, with the ground falling away sharply to the west and dropping some 150 metres to the south, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits within a landscape that has been worked and reworked across many centuries.

The site is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort defined by a stone rather than an earthen boundary wall, and what survives at Eantybeg is a structure in considerable but informative disarray. The original wall, once perhaps several metres thick, has long since collapsed into a spread of grass-covered rubble roughly three to four metres wide. No trace of the inner face remains upright. What you are looking at, effectively, is the skeleton of a wall rather than the wall itself.

The cashel measures approximately 24 metres east to west and just under 23 metres north to south, making it a modest but not insignificant enclosure. It appears on Ordnance Survey mapping from 1897 and again on the 1920 edition of the six-inch map, and it sits within a larger multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape preserves evidence of agricultural organisation from several different eras layered one over another. A gap at the south-east may represent the original entrance, though the lintel stone above it, two metres long and relatively thin, does not appear substantial enough to be part of the primary construction, and the gap itself is neither stone-lined nor accompanied by any visible passage through the wall thickness. A second gap at the north-east is clearly modern. A later drystone wall, the kind of modest boundary walling still common across the west of Ireland, has been built directly over the outer face of the cashel wall, and a buttress added at the east-south-east further complicates any reading of the original structure. A separate enclosure lies roughly 55 metres to the west-south-west, suggesting this was never an isolated feature in the landscape but part of something more extensive, even if exactly what that was remains difficult to unpick.

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