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XVI. 



TYPES OF THE EING-FOETS AND SIMILAE STEUCTUEES 

 EEMAINING IN EASTEEN CLAEE (QUIN, TULLA, AND BODYKE). 



By THOMAS JOHNSON WESTEOPP, m.a. 

 Plate XVII. 



Eead June 15. Ordered for Publication June 17. Published August 19, 1909. 



1. — The district of Clare with the forts^ of which we now deal is rather 

 hard to apportion ; so we are making this paper a study rather than a survey ; 

 and this seems best attained by taking certain natural groups to show the 

 prevailing types, and giving accounts of the more exceptional enclosures, even 

 when outside the groups. We hope to complete this study in a third paper, 

 dealing in it with some of the latest " royal " forts still extant, for the mid- 

 thirteenth century " rath of beauteous circles," " the circular rath and princely 

 palace of earth,^" has vanished from Clonroad. The Killaloe group probably 

 was dug during the ninth and tenth centuries ; unfortunately its most famous 

 edifice, Kincora, has long been levelled, and the very site forgotten. In the 

 subjects of the present paper we have few historical data to help us ; only two 

 of its existing forts, Magh Adhair, with a prehistoric tradition and historical 

 notices from a.d. 877, and TuUa, stated to be a stone fort of the period 

 from A.D. 600-620,^ have won a place even in the local records, and that 

 although the patrimony of one of the ablest, and for long the most powerful, of 

 the tribes in Thomond, the Clan Caisin, Ui Caisin, or Mac Namaras — " sons of 

 the sea-hound." They were fort-dwellers down till late in the Middle Ages ;^ 



i,We here, as in all our previous essays, use "forts" for earthen or stone structures not 

 necessarily defensive, and certainly not military in intent. "We cannot find any means short of 

 excavation for distinguishing the sepulchral from the residential, either in the types or by our early 

 literature, where the uses overlap. We hold, and have long held, that all the types occur in Ireland 

 from the Bronze Age to the fourteenth or fifteenth century of our era, if not still later, and have as a 

 rule no outward marks to show their object. 



2 Dug by Donchad Cairbreach O'Brien and completed by his son, Conchobhair, Princes of 

 Thomond, who died 1242 and 1269. The latter's grandson added a peel-tower before 1306. 



3 In the " Life of St. Mochulla." 



* For this fact, see Transactions, vol. xxxii., p. 158 — " every ollave rested in his rath . . , 

 and every layman in his liss," in the winter of 1317-18. We have constant allusions to forts. 

 Death visits the " royal rath " to carry off King Dermot O'Brien. Locblan MacNamara (slain 1313) 

 is of Liss Brin ; King Donchad (drowned 1283) is of Dun Caoin ; he had three forts near the Fergus. 

 " The dangan " of the O'Gradys was apparently a palisaded camp (1314). 



B.I. A. PROC, VOL. XXVII., SECT. C, [55] 



