Ringfort (Cashel), Rannagh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
Beneath the hazel scrub at Rannagh, a circular stone enclosure sits quietly on the Burren's exposed karst limestone, its builders having turned the rock beneath their feet into the very walls above it.
This is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built from dry-stone rather than earthen banks, and this particular example carries a detail that rewards careful attention: the stretch of wall running from the north-east around to the west-north-west was raised on a terrace of bedrock that appears to have been deliberately cut back. The effect was practical on two counts. Quarrying the bedrock provided ready stone for the wall itself, and by lowering the surrounding ground level, it made the finished wall appear taller from the outside than its modest height might otherwise suggest.
The cashel measures roughly 23 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west internally, forming an approximately circular enclosure. Its wall, averaging about a metre in width and surviving to no more than 0.7 metres in height, retains facing-stones on both its inner and outer faces, which is typical of dry-stone cashel construction throughout the west of Ireland. A gap on the east-south-east side, partially choked with tumbled stone, is most likely the original entrance, around 1.25 metres wide. The structure appeared on the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps of both 1842 and 1915, marked with the hachuring convention used to indicate earthworks and enclosures, which places it firmly in the landscape record well before modern archaeological classification caught up with it. It was catalogued as an enclosure rather than a cashel in the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, a reminder of how the same feature can be read differently depending on the state of ground survey at the time.