Ringfort (Cashel), Lislarheenmore, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Lislarheenmore, Co. Clare

On an east-facing slope in County Clare, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits within a field system that has been in use across many different periods of human activity.

What makes this cashel quietly odd is not its presence on the hillside, which would have been a sensible enough position for an early medieval farmstead, but the fact that it has no identifiable entrance. A cashel is a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, essentially a walled enclosure used to protect a household, its animals, and perhaps a small number of outbuildings. Here, the wall has long since collapsed inward, and no gap survives to suggest where a person or animal might once have passed through.

The structure measures roughly 19 metres across on its northwest to southeast axis and around 17 metres from northeast to southwest, making it a modest but not unusually small example of its type. The collapsed stone wall is about 1.6 metres wide in places and still reaches a maximum height of just over a metre. Outer-wall facing, where the original dressed or laid stonework is still visible, can be traced from the south-southwest round to the northwest; inner facing survives to around 0.8 metres at the northwest and southeast. The rest has slumped into a grassed-over bank, the kind of low, unassuming ridge that can easily be dismissed as a natural feature by anyone not looking closely. The site was recorded as an earthwork on the 1916 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a classification that somewhat undersells what it actually is. Approximately 30 metres to the north sits a larger enclosure, suggesting this part of the ridge was once a more elaborate or at least more densely occupied landscape than its current quiet appearance implies.

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