Ringfort (Cashel), Ballynahown, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballynahown, Co. Clare

Two stone enclosures sit close together on high rocky ground at Ballynahown in County Clare, so worn down by time that they barely announce themselves above the scrub.

This one, the westernmost of the pair, is a cashel, a type of ringfort built entirely from stone rather than earth and timber, and its circular wall has been reduced in most places to just a course or two above ground level. What survives is still legible as a coherent structure: roughly thirty metres across internally, with the wall reaching about a metre in height on the exterior at its better-preserved southern stretch, and a gate that once faced south-south-west.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded both enclosures in 1905, describing them as nearly circular and nearly levelled cahers, their walls of good slab masonry but surviving only rarely to more than a few courses. He noted wall thickness of around 2.1 metres, which is a substantial build, suggesting these were once solid and defensible enclosures rather than simple field boundaries. The site appeared on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1915, hachured to indicate the earthwork or stonework visible at each survey date. Inside the cashel, traces of internal walls extend towards the centre from the east-south-east, south-east, and south, hinting at structures that once divided or occupied the interior space. The wider landscape around it is similarly layered: a hut site lies roughly fifty metres to the south, a second cashel sits about forty metres to the east-south-east, and a cairn, a mound of piled stones that may mark a burial or simply a clearance, lies around a hundred metres to the west-south-west. Together they suggest a small concentrated settlement, its individual elements now scattered and overgrown but still in loose conversation with one another across the hillside.

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