Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyganner, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyganner, Co. Clare

What survives at Ballyganner is less a monument than a memory of one.

On a west-facing slope in County Clare, the outline of an early medieval cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, has spread itself so thoroughly across the rough pasture that it reads more as a broad smear of rubble than a structure. At its widest the stone spread runs between nine and eleven metres across, which gives some sense of how substantial the original enclosure must have been, even if little of it now rises above knee height.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted the site in 1915, describing it as a "nearly levelled cathair coarsely built of large blocks", and the century since has not been kind. A cashel of this kind would originally have enclosed a farmstead or settlement, its thick double-faced drystone wall serving as both boundary and defence. Here, that wall, once somewhere between two and two-and-a-quarter metres wide, survives only in fragments: a single course of large horizontally laid stones along part of the outer face, a low trace of the inner face visible to the north and east, and, at the north, a natural step of bedrock outcrop that the original builders incorporated neatly into the wall line. A later drystone field wall, still standing over a metre high, has been built directly on top of the older structure from the west-southwest around to the north, which complicates any reading of the original form. The almost circular plan, roughly 29.5 metres north to south and 28.4 metres east to west, is still legible on the ground, and the site sits within a large multiperiod field system that signals long, layered human activity in this landscape. It was marked on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1897.

The cashel does not stand alone. A second cashel lies approximately 45 metres to the south-southwest, and a wedge tomb, a megalithic burial monument of Neolithic or early Bronze Age date, sits around 85 metres to the north. The clustering of monuments from such different periods in one small area of Clare pasture points to a place that mattered, across a very long stretch of time, for reasons that are now mostly beyond recovery.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyganner, Co. Clare. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement