Ringfort (Cashel), Ballymurphy, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
On the Burren plateau above Ballymurphy, a low grassy bank traces out an oval in the rough pasture, and unless you know what you are looking at, it is easy to mistake it for nothing more than an uneven field boundary.
That is, in fact, exactly how the Ordnance Survey cartographers recorded it, on both the 1842 and the 1920 editions of the six-inch map. What they were drawing, without quite naming it, was a cashel, a type of early medieval ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank. The wall has largely collapsed and been swallowed by turf, but the underlying structure is still legible: a suboval enclosure measuring roughly 13.4 metres north to south and 11.7 metres east to west, with a bank between 4.8 and 6.8 metres wide.
The most telling detail is at the entrance, which faces south-east and flares outward in a way characteristic of early enclosures, narrowing from 1.8 metres at the outer threshold to just 0.8 metres on the interior side. On the southern arc, fragmentary remains of the original cashel wall survive beneath the grass, still measurable at 2.6 metres wide. At some later point, a drystone wall a metre high was built directly over the bank, running from the north-east around to the south-east and sitting on top of the inner face of the original cashel wall. This kind of reuse is common on the Burren, where stone has always been gathered, shifted, and repurposed across generations. The enclosure sits within a multiperiod field system, and grass-covered field walls abutting the cashel on the north, east, and south-west sides may themselves be associated with the original structure. A second enclosure lies around 160 metres to the south-west, suggesting this corner of the plateau was organised and inhabited over a long stretch of time, its boundaries accumulating layer upon layer until the whole thing was quietly mapped as an irregular field edge and largely forgotten.