Ringfort (Cashel), Lisket, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
A circular stone enclosure near the top of a south-facing slope in County Clare, this cashel carries several centuries of human activity within a remarkably compact footprint.
What catches the eye first is the layering: an early double-faced wall, now grass- and moss-covered, onto which a later drystone wall has been built, the two phases sitting one atop the other like geological strata made visible. A cashel is a ringfort constructed from stone rather than earth and timber, a form common across Ireland from the early medieval period onward, typically used as a farmstead enclosure. This one measures roughly 24.5 metres east-northeast to west-southwest and sits within a large multiperiod field system, suggesting the landscape around it has been managed and reused across very different eras.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1909 and may have identified a lintelled gateway, a flat stone laid horizontally across an entrance opening, which could correspond to the narrow entrance, just 0.6 metres wide, visible at the east-northeast. The outer wall-face survives best at the south-southwest to northeast arc, where large stones up to a metre in length are laid horizontally; a vertical break in the fabric is visible at the northwest, possibly indicating an old repair or a point of later interference. Three small stone cells, each between 2.6 and 3.2 metres long and built into the external wall-face at the north to east-northeast, appear to be later additions. Whether they served as shelters, storage, or something else is not recorded, but their neat, contiguous arrangement suggests deliberate construction rather than casual collapse. Collapsed rubble from the main wall now spreads six to seven metres wide in places across the inner and outer faces, softening the perimeter into the surrounding pasture. A second cashel lies roughly 95 metres to the southwest, and a cairn, a mound of stones often associated with prehistoric burial, sits about 136 metres to the north, making this part of Lisket an unusually concentrated pocket of early monuments.