Ringfort (Cashel), Moheramoylan, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Moheramoylan, Co. Clare

When the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited this site in 1898, he found a southern gateway still just about standing: six feet high, four feet four inches wide, built of very thin stone slabs, and, in his words, on the point of collapse.

That gateway is gone now, leaving behind a moss-covered sprawl of tumbled wall on a south-facing slope in County Clare, overlooking a quiet valley and embedded in a landscape that has been farmed, divided, and reworked across many centuries.

The cashel, a type of early medieval ringfort defined by a stone rather than an earthen enclosure wall, sits on the crest of a slope at Moheramoylan, its roughly subrectangular footprint measuring approximately 40 metres north to south and 39 metres east to west. Westropp recorded it as a "defaced caher" of about 120 feet across, and the name he would have known it by, Mothair an Mhaoláin, appears on Tim Robinson's map of 1977. The site was already marked on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, though even then the wall had clearly seen better days. What survives is a collapsed bank of stone, between four and six metres wide but only about a metre to a metre and a half high, its outer face visible in places as horizontally laid courses beneath the later drystone field walls that were built directly on top of it on the western, northern, and eastern sides. The interior sits noticeably lower than the ground immediately outside, and in the northern half lie the remains of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement and used variously for storage or refuge.

The site does not exist in isolation. Two further cashels lie within roughly 300 metres, one to the south-west and one to the north-west, and the whole area forms part of a larger multiperiod field system that has accumulated over a very long stretch of time. Inside the cashel, grass-covered foundations of later rectangular enclosures abut the western wall, and a small modern drystone corral occupies the south-western corner. The landscape here is one of continuous use and quiet accumulation, later walls cannibalising earlier ones, fields reshaping what came before them, and the original enclosure persisting as a low, moss-covered outline that requires some attention to read.

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