Ringfort (Cashel), Lislarheenmore, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Lislarheenmore, Co. Clare

What remains of this ancient enclosure in the Caher valley is easy to miss.

The wall has largely subsided into the earth, surviving now as a low, grass-covered spread of stone, rarely rising more than half a metre above the interior ground level. Only intermittent outer-facing stones along the northern and north-western arc hint that this was once a cashel, the term used for a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than an earthen bank. The eastern entrance is still legible, a gap of around 1.6 metres flanked on its southern side by two thin upright slabs reaching just over a metre in height. It is the kind of place that rewards patience and a certain willingness to read a landscape in fragments.

The cashel sits on a short, low spur projecting north-eastward into the Caher valley, with reclaimed pastureland pressing in on most sides and rougher grazing with outcropping rock surviving to the east and south. Its interior measures roughly 23.9 metres east to west and 22.8 metres north to south, placing it comfortably within the range of a substantial enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period. Within the south-western sector lie two further features: a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used for cool storage or concealment, and the remains of a collapsed structure. The site also sits within what has been identified as a multiperiod field system, suggesting that the landscape around it was being organised and reorganised over a very long span of time. A related cashel, known as Lislarheen Caher, lies roughly 220 metres to the north-east, raising the possibility that both enclosures functioned within the same farming or territorial arrangement. The site was already being recorded cartographically by the time of the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears marked with hachuring, and it features again on the 1916 edition.

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