Ringfort (Cashel), Gragan, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
Two stone enclosures sit within roughly twenty metres of each other on elevated ground at Gragan in the Burren, Co. Clare, which is already unusual enough.
But the southerly one of the pair adds a further wrinkle: it is rectangular rather than circular, a relatively uncommon form for a cashel. A cashel is a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and the great majority of them are roughly round. The rectangular plan here, with its carefully rounded corners, marks this enclosure out within an already distinctive monument type.
The structure measures approximately 32 metres north to south and 27.5 metres east to west. What survives today is largely a spread of collapsed stone between 1.8 and 3.5 metres wide, but patches of both inner and outer facing remain upright in places, reaching between 0.35 and 0.85 metres in height. Near the southern end of the east wall, enough of the original fabric is legible to suggest the wall was once around 1.5 metres thick, a reasonable gauge of its former solidity. Traces of possible internal structures have been identified in three of the four corners. Later field walls, clearly of a different era, extend northward from the two northern corners, threading the cashel into a broader agricultural landscape that itself spans multiple periods of use. The enclosure appears on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1842 and 1916, and was formally recorded as a rectangular enclosure in 1996. Its neighbour to the north, another cashel, sits just beyond the collapsed northern wall.
The site occupies elevated ground, though the surrounding terrain limits how far the eye can travel in most directions. The exception is to the north-east, where the land opens toward Ballyvaghan and out across Galway Bay, a view that feels all the more pointed for being the only one available from what is otherwise a quietly enclosed and overlooked corner of the Burren.