Ringfort (Cashel), Poulcaragharush, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Poulcaragharush, Co. Clare

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that early medieval people in Ireland built to define territory and protect livestock, and the one at Poulcaragharush in County Clare is notable less for what survives than for how long it has been disappearing.

When the antiquarian T. J. Westropp visited in 1898, he noted it was already "in parts nearly levelled". More than a century later, the site has continued its slow dissolution into the hillside, and what remains is now spread across a wide arc of moss-covered stone rather than anything resembling a standing wall.

The cashel sits on high ground overlooking the Eanty Valley to the north, with the land dropping away steeply on the western and north-eastern sides. The enclosure is roughly subcircular, measuring about 20 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west. Sections of the stone wall, originally around 1.4 metres wide, are still visible along the northern and eastern arc, rising to a maximum height of 0.8 metres in places. Elsewhere the perimeter has collapsed into a moss-covered stone spread between 2.5 and 5 metres wide. Along the north-east to south-east arc there are four breaks in the wall, some of which appear to be apertures leading into small cells or cavities within the wall thickness, each roughly 0.9 metres wide and 0.7 metres deep. A possible entrance survives at the east, its northern side still marked by a straight line of stonework running through the wall. One stretch of the cashel's fabric has been reused entirely: a modern drystone wall, a metre high, has been built directly over the spread of the old wall from the south-east around to the north-west. The site also sits within a large multiperiod field system, suggesting the landscape here has been managed and reworked across many centuries. A second cashel lies approximately 26 metres to the south-east, hinting that this hillside once carried more organised settlement than its current rough-pasture appearance would suggest. Both sites were already recorded on Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and again in 1920, a reminder that the slow disappearance has been documented across several generations.

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