Ringfort (Cashel), Faunarooska, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
The townland name Faunarooska may carry a clue to what lies within it.
One possible translation is 'slope of the quarrel', and the antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1901, thought that name might itself be connected to the stone enclosures, or cahers, scattered across the area. Whether or not the etymology holds, there is something faintly apt about a place whose name hints at conflict and whose main archaeological feature has been quietly losing ground to hazel scrub and later stonework for centuries.
The cashel here, a type of ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, was once a substantial structure. It was bivallate, meaning it had two concentric defensive walls separated by a fosse, or ditch, giving it an estimated original external diameter of around 43 metres. The inner wall, between 1.5 and 3.4 metres wide, and the outer wall, around 3 metres wide, enclosed a space roughly 24.6 metres across. Inside, the northern half held a rectangular house site, and a trackway running roughly south-southeast to north-northwest still crosses the interior, along with a later wall that was inserted at some point after the cashel's original use. When Westropp visited and recorded the site for the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, he found it already overgrown, much levelled, and, as he put it, confused by modern walls. That picture has not much changed. The surviving facing stones in the outer wall, preserved to a maximum height of around one metre on the northeast to southwest arc, give the clearest sense of what the original construction looked like, while the inner wall, visible from northwest to southeast, is considerably more worn. The whole sits on an east-facing slope close to the Rathborney River, embedded within a wider multiperiod field system whose boundaries have accumulated and overlapped across many generations.