Ringfort (Cashel), Lislarheenmore, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Lislarheenmore, Co. Clare

In a rough pasture on a gently westward-sloping hillside in County Clare, there is a structure that has been mapped, farmed around, and quietly misidentified for well over a century.

What survives is an oval cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort, its walls now reduced to a spread of tumbled stone rather than anything resembling an upright rampart. The interior measures roughly 19 metres east to west and 16 metres north to south, with the wall spread running between two and four metres wide and standing no more than about 0.9 metres at its highest point on the exterior. It is the kind of monument that could easily be walked across without registering as a monument at all.

The Ordnance Survey mapped it as far back as 1842, and again in the 1916 edition of the six-inch map, using hachuring to indicate an earthwork of some kind. By 1996, when it was formally listed in the Record of Monuments and Places, it was classified simply as an enclosure, a catch-all term that reflects how little of its original character remained legible by that point. The cashel sits within what is described as a multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it carries traces of agricultural organisation from more than one era, layers of human land use accumulated over centuries and still faintly visible in the ground. At some point after the cashel fell out of use, a pen was built abutting its north-eastern side, the kind of practical reuse that was common once the original function of such enclosures was forgotten. That pen is now disused as well.

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Pete F
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