Ringfort (Cashel), Tullycommon, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Tullycommon, Co. Clare

On the northern shoulder of a semi-karst hill in Tullycommon, County Clare, an oval stone enclosure sits quietly in rough pasture, its walls mostly collapsed but still legible in the landscape.

This is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort defined by a stone rather than an earthen bank, and this particular example is unusual not for any single dramatic feature but for the density of human activity surrounding it. Within roughly 100 metres, there is a second cashel directly adjoining it to the east, an enclosure to the northwest, and a cairn to the northeast, all embedded within a multiperiod field system that hints at prolonged, layered occupation of this hillside over many centuries.

The cashel itself measures approximately 21 metres east to west and 16.4 metres north to south internally. Its double-faced stone wall, a construction technique in which two lines of facing stones contain a rubble core, has largely fallen, leaving a spread of tumble between 2.2 and 3.2 metres wide in places, though stones of the inner face emerge intermittently from the debris. A later drystone wall, the kind of field boundary still common across the Burren and its fringes, has been built directly over the enclosure wall along the ESE to southern arc, which speaks to the site being treated as useful raw material long after its original function was forgotten. A gap of around five metres in the southwest perimeter appears to be a modern intrusion rather than an original entrance. At the western edge of the interior, a hut site survives, a further trace of whatever domestic or agricultural life once took place within the enclosure.

What makes the position worth noting is the view it commands across a wide arc from west to north, a quality that would have made this shoulder of the hill attractive for settlement, observation, or both. The conjoined cashel to the east is described as slightly larger and more substantial, suggesting the two enclosures may have functioned in relation to one another, perhaps representing different phases of use or different households sharing a common boundary. The semi-karst character of the underlying geology is a reminder that this is the limestone country of east Clare, where the rock is rarely far below the surface and where stone was always the natural building material.

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