Ringfort (Cashel), Poulacarran, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Poulacarran, Co. Clare

Sitting on a slight rise in the floor of Poulacarran Valley in Co. Clare, this roughly square enclosure is the kind of site that rewards a second look.

At first glance it reads as a weathered field boundary, with later drystone walls built directly over its southern and eastern perimeter. Look more carefully and the underlying structure becomes clear: a cashel, the term used for a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank and ditch. What makes this one quietly interesting is the interior arrangement. Tucked into the south-western corner is a rectangular corral, roughly ten metres by six, its northern and eastern sides formed from loose boulders while the cashel wall itself serves as the western and southern boundary. That reuse of existing stonework suggests a practical, opportunistic mind at work, someone enclosing a space for livestock within the shelter of an already substantial perimeter.

The cashel measures approximately 23.5 metres east to west and around 23 metres north to south, making it nearly square in plan, which is unusual enough that it was catalogued as a rectangular enclosure rather than a typical ringfort when the Record of Monuments and Places was compiled in 1996. Its double-faced wall, built from two parallel stone faces with rubble between them and standing between 0.3 and 1.2 metres high, survives well on most sides, though the southern stretch has been reduced to a low stony bank. The site appears on both the 1842 and 1920 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked with the hachured symbol used to indicate earthworks and enclosures. To the immediate south and west, quarry-like depressions pock the ground, possibly the source of stone used in the cashel's construction. About 53 metres to the north-east lies a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough, suggesting the valley floor was in use long before the cashel was ever raised.

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