Ringfort, Leana, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Leana, Co. Clare

A low, curving scarp in a field of level pasture near Leana in County Clare is almost all that remains of what cartographers once confidently recorded as a circular enclosure.

The site has slipped so far from official recognition that it was omitted entirely from the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, yet it had been mapped not once but three times across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each successive survey quietly tracing the same ghostly ring.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1842, marks it with hachures, the fine radiating lines surveyors used to indicate an earthwork or raised feature, suggesting a roughly circular enclosure approximately thirty metres in diameter. A ringfort, to give the feature its common name, is a circular enclosed settlement of early medieval date, typically defined by an earthen bank or a stone wall and used as a farmstead or place of security. The outline reappears on the OS twenty-five inch plan of 1897 and again on the Cassini edition of the six-inch map from 1920, indicating that something of the perimeter was still legible on the ground well into the twentieth century. By the time aerial imagery was examined for the period 2011 to 2013, only a low, curving scarp could be traced running roughly west-northwest to north to northeast, visible mainly as a shadow cast across the improved pasture. To the east, the land rises toward an overgrown karst plateau, the characteristic limestone terrain of the Burren region, all fissured rock and thin soil. Roughly fifty-five metres to the northeast sits a cashel, a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, which has fared rather better in the historical record and carries its own monument number.

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