Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara by Tim Robinson

my way down in torrential rain to Mám Chatha from the south when I came across an ancient stone-walled enclosure about a hundred yards across, which was not marked on the Ordnance Survey maps nor mentioned in the almost exhaustive one-man survey of the Burren ‘forts’ conducted by the Clare archaeologist T.J. Westropp in the 1900s. It consisted of a very dilapidated and irregular semicircular arc of wall springing from the face of a steep scarp crossing the slope just above the saddlepoint of the pass. Whether its purpose had been military, watching over the pass, or peaceable, for the coralling of cattle at a half-way stage of their seasonal migrations, I could not tell. It is only one (but a very large and unusual one) among hundreds of walled enclosures, some of them magnificently situated and visible from afar, others so degraded and enmeshed with more recent fences that it takes a trained eye to distinguish them from the fields around them.
    The majority of the three or four hundred ringforts in the Burren are roughly circular and often about twenty yards across, with simply built drystone walls a few feet thick, and they served as cattle yards around small huts, the individual farms of Iron Age and Early Christian times. But a number of them are more imposing , with walls up to five or six yards thick, rising in two or three terrace-like steps inside; a few of them still retain their lintelled doorways. Some are surrounded by one or two outer ramparts, while Baile Cinn Mhargaidh near Kilfenora has an abattis of set,slanting stones around it like the two cliff-forts of Aran. Despite such forbidding externals these great cashels may not have been built with warfare in mind; their outworks may have reflected communal prestige; their interior terraces, it has been suggested, are better adapted to viewing ceremonials within than repelling the foe without. Perhaps such monuments served various purposes, sacred and profane – but since the Celts who built them could not confide their intentions to writing, less is known about the cashels of the Burren than about the pyramids of Egypt. Cathair Mhaol, the ‘low-topped ( i.e. dilapidated) fort’, at the foot of the slope just west of Mám Chatha, is typical of these almost anonymous ruins. Like so many others it is deeply obscured by thickets; to fight one’s way through them, groping to and fro until one can stretch out a hand to the mighty masonry, is to experience the past in all its difficulty of access and indubitable reality: here was the pride of some well set-up community, and it lies overthrown among thorns.
    But it is not just individual monuments, the scores of cashels and hundreds of lesser ringforts, that lie waiting attention in the Burren; there are webs of ancient field-walls, large tracts of the agrarian landscape from which such monuments drew their sustenance , a stone document of the life of that Late Iron Age and Early Christian period, still legible despite all the layers of overwriting . And interwoven with that message there are earlier ones, from the Bronze Age and the Neolithic, smudged and torn but not indecipherable. Not one of the Burren’s sixty or so wedge tombs has been investigated, but the famous ‘dolmen’ at Poulnabrone, a portal tomb with a huge and rakishly poised capstone, which has had the misfortune to be adopted as a touristic mascot of the region and featured in a thousand vapid come-ons, has been excavated and turns out be five hundred or a thousand years older than had been thought, dating from the Middle rather than the Late Neolithic. Modern’ archaeological techniques could well overturn all current assumptions about the course of settlement in the Burren, but the prospect of anything more than a cursory survey of the monuments of this, one of the world’s richest and most complex prehistoric landscapes, are fading for lack of funds.
    However, since the Burren has scarcely been picked over bythe professionals the amateur