Ringfort (Cashel), Tullycommon, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
What the Ordnance Survey cartographers recorded at Tullycommon in 1842 was not a ruin but a working farmstead: four roofed buildings sitting inside what had, for centuries or longer, been a cashel.
A cashel is a ringfort enclosed by a dry-stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one in County Clare had been quietly colonised by agricultural life to the point where the fort itself went unacknowledged on that first edition of the six-inch map. By the time the twenty-five-inch survey was completed in 1897, the four buildings were shown again, but this time unroofed, their working days apparently over. The Cassini edition of 1920 records the same picture. The archaeology had been there all along, simply waiting beneath the later occupation.
The cashel is oval in plan, measuring roughly 38 metres across its longer axis internally, with walls that have since collapsed to just under a metre in height on the interior side. Moss covers much of the stonework, and a poorly defined gap on the southern side may represent an original or later entrance. Additional walling was built against the outer face along the western to north-north-eastern arc and at the east-north-east, suggesting the enclosure was modified and reused across different periods. Inside, the ground is uneven and scattered with foundations, the physical remains of those buildings the Victorian surveyors drew. Just outside the wall to the north-west, a small circular feature with a kiln-like form sits quietly in the rough pasture. A concentric enclosure of a related type lies approximately 105 metres to the south-west, suggesting this corner of Tullycommon was once a more organised and inhabited landscape than the overgrown field margins now imply.