Ringfort (Cashel), Meggagh, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Meggagh, Co. Clare

What looks at first glance like a low, grassy bank at the western edge of a plateau in County Clare is in fact the collapsed remains of a cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort, quietly embedded in a field system that has been in use across multiple periods of history.

The bank is not especially tall, reaching perhaps half a metre above the surrounding pasture, and the outer wall facing has largely crumbled away on the southern and south-western sides, leaving only a spread of stone rubble two to three and a half metres wide to mark where a substantial circular enclosure once stood.

The cashel measures roughly 24 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, giving it a slightly irregular, subcircular shape. It was already being recorded cartographically in the mid-nineteenth century, appearing on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan of 1842 and again on the revised 6-inch map of 1920, suggesting it was a legible feature in the landscape across the century in between. A gap of about two metres on the western side is considered a later insertion rather than an original entrance. More intriguing is the presence of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber often associated with storage or refuge in early Irish settlements, located beneath the northern half of the interior. Field boundaries radiate outward from the cashel at several compass points, east, south-east, south-west, west, and north-west, suggesting that the structure was once a focal point in an organised agricultural landscape rather than a solitary monument. A separate enclosure sits approximately 140 metres to the north-east, hinting at a broader pattern of activity across this plateau that has yet to be fully mapped or understood.

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Pete F
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