Ringfort (Cashel), Fahee, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
On a west-facing slope in County Clare, a stone ringfort sits quietly absorbed into the working landscape around it, its ancient walls now carrying a second, later wall built directly on top of them, and a modern animal pen tucked inside its interior.
This layering of uses across centuries is not unusual for such sites, but it is rarely so plainly legible. The cashel, a term for a ringfort defined by a stone enclosure rather than an earthen bank and ditch, measures roughly twenty metres east to west and eighteen metres north to south, and occupies a south-west-facing terrace on the slope of a semi-karst hill in Fahee North, that particular kind of limestone landscape where the ground alternates between thin soil and exposed rock.
The structure was already being mapped by the late nineteenth century, appearing on the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch plan of 1897 and again on the six-inch edition of 1920. What survives of the original wall is about 1.8 metres wide, though its height has been reduced considerably, standing only half a metre on the interior face and between 0.4 and 0.7 metres on the exterior. Where the original facing stones remain, they are well-worked and set on edge, a detail that points to some care in the original construction. Larger blocks appear in the wall at the east and south-east. Beyond the cashel itself, collapsed walls radiate outward to the east and south-south-west, remnants of an extensive field system that once covered much of Fahee North. Whitethorn trees, which in Ireland are often associated with ancient boundaries and are treated with considerable wariness by farmers who remember the old traditions, grow along the western perimeter.
The site sits within a broader agricultural landscape and still functions as part of one, which is part of what makes it worth attention. The wide views it commands, from south-south-east around to north-west, suggest the terrace was chosen deliberately, as was so often the case with cashels whose position on a slope served both practical and social purposes. The gap in the north-west wall is modern, made for farm access, and the later wall built over the original circuit means the cashel's outline is now partially obscured by the very activity that has also, in a sense, preserved it.