Ringfort (Cashel), Creevagh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Creevagh, Co. Clare

What survives at Creevagh is less a monument than a ghost of one, and even that ghost has been quietly colonised by later generations.

Set on a gently northward-sloping semi-karst plateau in rough pasture, the site presents itself to the casual eye as little more than a tumble of stone in an old field system. Only on closer inspection does the logic of an early medieval cashel begin to resolve out of the collapse.

A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this example is subcircular in plan, with an internal diameter of around 19.5 metres north to south and an external diameter of roughly 23.1 metres. What remains is the western half of the enclosing wall, curving from south-southwest to north, its outer face visible in places to a maximum height of about half a metre. The eastern half has either collapsed entirely or been absorbed into later activity on the site. That later activity is considerable: a drystone field wall has been laid directly over the cashel wall from west to north, and a second straight wall runs north-northwest to south-southeast straight through the interior, dividing it as if the earlier structure were simply convenient raw material, which of course it was. Additional field walls have been built around the outside. Beneath all of this, south of centre, is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge. Its presence suggests the cashel was once a functioning domestic enclosure of some significance, even if the surface evidence has been thoroughly confused by centuries of agricultural reuse. The plateau setting, with open views from north to south, is characteristic of cashel placement in this part of Clare, where the karst landscape offered both building stone and reasonably defensible elevated ground.

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