Ringfort (Cashel), Tullycommon, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Tullycommon, Co. Clare

At Tullycommon in County Clare, two circular stone enclosures sit side by side on grass-covered limestone karst, the kind of bare, fissured terrain the Burren is known for.

The eastern of the pair is a cashel, a type of ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and what makes it worth pausing over is the way it has grown into its landscape. The boundary here is not a clean, purposefully built wall so much as a stone spread, between a quarter and two-thirds of a metre high and nearly four metres wide in places, with a drystone wall raised on top of it. At the north-east, that wall continues along the line of an older field boundary of the same construction, the newer structure simply following the logic of what was already there.

The enclosure itself is roughly circular, measuring just under eighteen metres across internally in both directions. A narrow entrance at the east-south-east, about a metre wide, is marked by two flat slabs laid across the line of the wall, a simple threshold that has endured. The cashel sits within a very large field system and is adjoined to the north by a number of irregular related fields, while its companion enclosure lies immediately to the west. A hut site has also been recorded nearby, suggesting this was once a working complex rather than a single isolated structure. The whole arrangement, on a gentle north-facing slope of exposed limestone, speaks to the way early medieval farming communities in the west of Ireland built their lives around clusters of enclosures, fields, and domestic spaces that blurred into one another over generations.

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