Ringfort (Cashel), Ballygastell, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballygastell, Co. Clare

A road has reshaped this ancient enclosure at Ballygastell in County Clare, cutting through its south-eastern edge and turning what was once a roughly circular cashel into something closer to a D on the ground.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the type favoured across the limestone-rich west of Ireland, and this one sits on a low rise among undulating pastureland and the grey outcrops typical of Clare's landscape. The road, running east-north-east to west-south-west, did not simply bypass the monument; it bisected part of it, leaving the surviving circuit truncated on one side and intact enough on the other to still read as an enclosure.

In its original form, the cashel measured approximately 41 metres east-north-east to west-south-west and around 34 metres east to west, a substantial subcircular space. The defining wall has long since collapsed and grass has grown over the rubble, but its presence can still be traced as a low spread of stone up to 2.5 metres wide when the tumble is included. On the north-western arc, the outer wall-face retains two or three courses of stonework, giving some sense of its original height. Small gaps cut through the wall at intervals between north and south-east, the kind of low openings made in later centuries to allow livestock to pass between fields. Inside the enclosure, the northern half contains the remains of a house site, and the western wall of that later structure continues southward for about 17 metres, nearly splitting the cashel interior in two. A shorter run of similar collapsed walling, around 5 metres long, sits in the southern sector to the east of this internal division. The whole complex appears on Robinson's map of 1977, suggesting the earthwork was recognisable and documented well before more systematic survey work was carried out.

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