Caher of Mortyclogh, Mortyclogh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ringforts

Caher of Mortyclogh, Mortyclogh, Co. Clare

What remains of this early stone enclosure in County Clare is easy to miss.

The walls have largely collapsed into a low, grassed-over spread of rubble, nowhere more than 0.8 metres high, and a later field wall has been built directly over its northern edge, obscuring the line of the original inner face. Yet the site carries a name layered with competing meanings, and beneath its unremarkable surface there is an accessible souterrain, an underground passage of the kind built in early medieval Ireland for storage, shelter, or refuge, as well as the remnants of a rectangular stone building within the interior.

The cashel, a type of stone-walled circular or subcircular enclosure common in early medieval Ireland, measures roughly 44 metres north to south and nearly as much east to west. It sits on a gentle east-facing slope near the crest of a low ridge, surrounded by pasture and meadowland. Its Irish name, Móthair Tí Clogh, recorded by Tim Robinson in 1977, appears to carry two distinct references. The word mothair is a local toponym used for square ringforts, which may hint at the enclosure's original form. The second element, tí clogh, likely refers to the stone house whose ruins still stand inside. But there is a third reading, recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Westropp in 1911: local tradition held the name to commemorate a Mortough garbh O'Brien who fell in battle nearby in 1317. Whether the name is topographical, descriptive, or memorial, probably all three threads were already tangled by the time anyone thought to write them down. The Ordnance Survey mapped the site in 1842 and again in 1915, on both occasions marking it carefully and noting a cave in the interior, the same souterrain that remains accessible today. A graveyard lies roughly 100 metres to the west-southwest, and an invisible ringfort, no longer legible at ground level, sits about 250 metres to the southwest, suggesting this small ridge carried a concentration of early activity that time has largely dissolved back into farmland.

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