Ringfort (Cashel), Ballynabinnia, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
What survives at Ballynabinnia is easy to overlook, which is precisely what makes it quietly interesting.
On a gentle south-facing slope in County Clare, the remains of an early Irish cashel, a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, have been absorbed almost entirely into the landscape. The enclosure is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 28 metres east to west and 25 metres north to south internally, and its boundary has largely dissolved into a low, overgrown spread of stone, nowhere rising above a metre and in places barely above ground level.
A cashel of this kind would typically have enclosed a single farmstead during the early medieval period, perhaps between the fifth and twelfth centuries, when this form of enclosed settlement was widespread across Ireland. The boundary here is not uniform: along the northern and south-western arcs it survives as little more than a weathered stone scatter two to three metres wide, partly merged with hedgerow growth, while elsewhere a drystone wall standing to about a metre still marks the line of the original enclosure. That variation, hedge in some stretches and wall in others, hints at centuries of incremental change, with later agricultural use quietly reshaping what earlier inhabitants had built. The site was catalogued as an enclosure rather than a ringfort in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, a classification that reflects how much of the original fabric has been lost or obscured.