Ringfort (Cashel), Fanygalvan, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Fanygalvan, Co. Clare

At roughly 400 to 500 feet above sea level in the rough grazing land of Fanygalvan, a stone ringfort sits in a slight hollow, arranged so that it is almost invisible until you are nearly upon it.

This is not an accident of erosion or neglect; the cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone rather than earthen enclosure wall, occupies a dip in the landscape that would have limited the view of it from the surrounding ground. That quality of quiet concealment, combined with the fact that field walls from later centuries were simply built on top of its perimeter bank, gives the place a layered, palimpsest quality that is more legible on closer inspection than from any distance.

The structure itself is subcircular, measuring roughly 28 metres east to west and 23 metres north to south internally, with a wide stony bank between two and four metres across and still standing around 0.6 to 0.8 metres high in places. A later field wall runs along the top of this bank, which tells its own story about continuity of land use. The interior is largely flat, and against the north-west of the perimeter there is a small oval livestock pen, only about three metres across, which may overlie an earlier hut site. Just outside the cashel to the north-west stands a separate hut site, and field walls radiate outward from the cashel at the east, west, and north, connecting it to a wider multiperiod field system that spreads across this part of the hillside. A further enclosure lies approximately 87 metres to the north-north-east. The cashel was recorded on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 and again on the Cassini edition of 1920, suggesting it has been a consistent, if low-key, presence in the local landscape for as long as surveyors have been paying attention to this corner of County Clare.

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Pete F
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