Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyclancahill, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
At the southern edge of a natural shelf at the foot of Ballyganner hill in County Clare, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits within a landscape that has clearly been worked and organised for a very long time.
What makes this particular cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, quietly compelling is not any single dramatic feature but rather the density of human activity concentrated in such a small area. Another cashel lies only about eighteen metres to the north-north-west, and a further enclosure abuts it directly to the south-east, suggesting that whoever lived and farmed here was part of a closely arranged community rather than an isolated household.
The structure itself is subcircular, measuring roughly 28.6 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and 24.6 metres north-west to south-east. The outer face of the wall, standing between one and one and a half metres high, remains well defined all the way around, with up to three courses of horizontally laid stone still visible. The individual stones are substantial, each around 0.8 metres long and nearly as tall, fitted together without mortar in the drystone tradition. The interior has been built up over time until it sits level with the spread of collapsed wall material that now defines the perimeter, a detail that hints at long and layered occupation. A later drystone wall has been added on top of the outer face at the north-west, showing the site was still being adapted well after its original construction. The gaps at north-north-west and east-north-east are not original entrances but breaks that have appeared over the centuries. The cashel was already significant enough to be marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1840 and 1916, hachured in the cartographic convention used to indicate earthworks and enclosures, though it was recorded somewhat blandly as an "Enclosure" in the Record of Monuments and Places as late as 1996.