Caherahoagh Forts, Caherbullaun, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Caherahoagh Forts, Caherbullaun, Co. Clare

On the limestone karst of County Clare, a partially collapsed cashel sits so overgrown with trees and field-clearance material that it risks disappearing into the landscape entirely.

A cashel is a type of early Irish stone enclosure, typically circular or subcircular, built without mortar and used as a farmstead or place of refuge. This one measures roughly 30 metres across its interior, and its walls, where they survive, still reach about a metre in height on the exterior. Sections along the north-east, east, south-west, and west have been removed altogether, and on the northern side a later drystone field wall has simply been built directly on top of the ancient structure, treating it as convenient raw material or foundation.

The site has carried more than one name across the documentary record. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 labels it 'Caherahoagh Forts', a name that also encompasses an adjacent cashel situated roughly 25 metres to the north-east. By the time of the OS 25-inch plan in 1897 and the Cassini edition of the six-inch map in 1920, it had been renamed 'Caherbullaun Forts'. The antiquary T. J. Westropp, who was surveying and recording Clare's stone monuments extensively during the late nineteenth century, referred to it as 'Caherbullaun' in 1896. The slippage between names is a small but telling detail; monuments on the Burren and surrounding karst often accumulated variant names as surveyors, landowners, and local usage pulled in different directions, and pinning down a single authoritative title has rarely been straightforward in this part of Ireland.

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