Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyconnoe, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
On the Burren's limestone plateau in County Clare, what looks at first like a low, grassy ring in the pasture turns out to be the remains of a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort that was once a farmstead or small settlement enclosed for protection.
What makes the one at Ballyconnoe quietly compelling is not any single dramatic feature but the way it sits within a landscape that has been continuously reshaped over centuries, its walls now partly absorbed into later field boundaries, its interior crossed by a division that belongs to a different era entirely.
The cashel is roughly subcircular in plan, measuring about 28.5 metres across its longer axis, with a surrounding wall that was originally between 0.9 and 1.2 metres wide. That original stonework is still readable at the northern arc, where the inner core has not been obscured, and sections of the outer wall-facing survive to the north-north-east and around the southern and western stretches. The wall stands only 0.4 to 0.5 metres high today, spread to between one and a half and two and a half metres by collapse and overgrowth, but its circuit is still coherent. Two gaps, one about two metres wide at the north and a wider one of around 4.6 metres at the south, are later intrusions rather than original entrances. The cashel sits within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape carries evidence of human activity from several different periods layered one upon another, and two further cashels lie within roughly 160 metres of this one, to the north-north-west and to the south-west respectively. A small house stands about 17 metres to the east-north-east. The clustering of these enclosures suggests this elevated, karst limestone ground was once a notably organised and inhabited place, long before the field walls that now thread through and around the older structures.