Ringfort (Cashel), Deerpark, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Deerpark, Co. Clare

A later wall built to contain deer has sliced clean through an early medieval stone enclosure in the Leamaneh valley, Co. Clare, leaving the older structure divided and quietly erased across the landscape.

The intruding boundary belongs to the deerpark of Leamaneh Castle, and its east-west line cuts the cashel so decisively that most of the enclosure, roughly 14.8 metres worth, sits to the north of it, while only about 3 metres survives to the south. A cashel is a type of ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, common across the limestone terrain of the Burren, and this one measured approximately 19.6 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west in its original form. Today the wall remnants stand no more than 0.2 metres high, barely proud of the interior ground surface, and survive only along the northern and eastern arcs.

The site sits on an east-west ridge in a col, a low saddle between higher ground, in the Leamaneh valley. Leamaneh Castle itself stands on an extension of the same ridge to the east, and the deerpark wall that traverses this cashel was constructed as part of that castle's designed landscape. The association matters because it gives some sense of the sequence: the cashel predates the castle's deerpark, and the later boundary was simply driven through whatever earlier remains stood in the way. The site appeared on Tim Robinson's map of the Burren in 1977 and was listed as an enclosure in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. A second enclosure lies approximately 87 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting this part of the valley once held more activity than its current appearance implies.

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Pete F
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