Ringfort (Cashel), Aglish, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
On a north-facing slope in the townland of Aglish, County Clare, a tree-covered ringfort sits quietly in pasture, its outline more felt than seen.
What makes it worth a second look is the patchwork of survival written into its walls: part of the perimeter still stands in the form of a double-faced stone cashel wall, while the rest has been reduced to a low earthen bank, and a later field wall has been laid straight across the interior as if the older structure were simply convenient raw material.
A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank or ditch, and this example at Aglish is roughly subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 35.7 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west internally. The more intact section, running from the east-north-east around through south to south-west, retains a double-faced wall between 1.4 and 2.5 metres wide and standing to around 1.2 to 1.5 metres on the interior face. A livestock gap has been cut through this surviving stretch at the east-north-east, a commonplace agricultural adaptation that tells its own quiet story about how these ancient enclosures have continued to be used by farming communities long after their original purpose was forgotten. Around the northern arc, the cashel wall was removed at some point, leaving only a low stone-covered earthen bank, though vestiges of the original double-faced wall, roughly 1.7 metres wide, remain visible at the west-north-west. The footings of a later field wall, only 0.6 metres wide, cut across the eastern part of the interior on a north-west to south-east line. The site appears on both the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, dated 1842, and the later Cassini edition of 1920, where it is marked by hachuring, the cartographic convention used to indicate earthwork features. By 1996 it was catalogued in the Record of Monuments and Places simply as an enclosure, a designation that gives little sense of what the stonework, even in its fragmentary state, actually represents.