Ringfort (Cashel), Kiltacky Beg, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
A cashel sits on a low rise in the townland of Kiltacky Beg, Co. Clare, its ancient drystone boundary now partly folded into the routine business of a working farm.
A cashel is essentially a stone-walled ringfort, the kind of enclosed settlement that was common across Ireland from the early medieval period, and this one is a substantial example, measuring roughly 57 metres across at its widest. What makes it quietly unusual is the layering of uses it has absorbed over the centuries, so that the original enclosure and later agricultural life have become difficult to separate.
The circular wall is double-faced, meaning it was built with two outer skins of stone and rubble fill between them, and it survives reasonably well along the south-west to north arc, standing between 0.7 and 1.5 metres high. Elsewhere the wall has collapsed outward, tumbling down a short natural escarpment that runs along the northern and eastern edges. The stonework is uncoursed, that is, laid without regular horizontal rows, and there are signs it may have been rebuilt at some point, perhaps when a narrow sheep gate was inserted at the north-north-west, a gap just 0.6 metres wide and 0.85 metres high. A livestock gap on the eastern side and an entrance gap to the south-west were noted as looking relatively recent when the site was inspected in 2000. The whole perimeter has been planted with a hawthorn hedge, and the interior is kept under grass. The monument had already been mapped twice before any formal archaeological record was made, appearing on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 and again on the later Cassini edition of 1920. A disused lime kiln, the kind of small stone structure once used to burn limestone into agricultural lime for soil improvement, was recorded immediately to the north-east of the cashel wall on the 25-inch Ordnance Survey plan, adding another layer of agricultural history to the same small patch of ground.
The site sits among scrub and exposed limestone pavement on its eastern, southern, and north-western sides, the kind of terrain that characterises parts of the wider Burren landscape in Co. Clare. An aerial photograph taken in 2007 gives some sense of how the cashel reads from above, the circular form still legible against the improved pasture, the hawthorn hedge tracing the perimeter.
