Ringfort (Cashel), Leana, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
In the dense woodland of Leana, on a south and south-westerly facing slope in County Clare, the outline of an ancient stone enclosure is slowly being reclaimed by the trees around it.
The site is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and this one is doing its best to disappear entirely. The circular interior measures roughly 22 metres across its north-south axis, but visitors expecting a dramatic monument would find only a low, overgrown scarp on the western to northern arc and a stony bank elsewhere, neither rising much above half a metre in height. In places, stones have been laid horizontally across the bank's surface, a detail that suggests deliberate construction rather than simple field clearance, though time and vegetation have left little else to confirm it.
The site appears on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan of 1897 and again on the Cassini edition of the OS 6-inch map from 1920, mapped both times using hachures, the short radiating lines surveyors used to indicate an enclosure or earthwork. By 1996, when it was assessed for the Record of Monuments and Places, it had been reclassified under the more cautious term 'Enclosure', a reflection of how little of the original structure remained legible by then. Around 6 metres to the south-west lies a quarry, and it is plausible, though not certain from what survives, that the two features share some historical relationship, the cashel's stone perhaps having been robbed out over the centuries to serve other purposes nearby.
The woodland cover makes the site difficult to read on the ground. The scarp and bank that define the cashel's circuit are subtle enough that without some prior knowledge of what to look for, the whole thing could pass for a natural rise in the terrain. The horizontal stonework on the bank's surface is probably the clearest indicator that human hands shaped this place, and it is worth moving slowly around the perimeter to pick out where that survives.
