Ringfort (Cashel), Ballinard, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballinard, Co. Limerick

Three ringforts once ran in a straight line along the highest ridge of a hill in Ballinard, Co. Limerick, an arrangement unusual enough to catch the eye even on a map.

Of those three, one has vanished entirely, consumed by quarrying at some point after it was recorded on the first Ordnance Survey. A second survives in a fragmentary state. The site known as LI032-086, the more easterly of the two that remain, is a cashel, meaning a ringfort defined by a stone rather than an earthen enclosure, and its story is as much about what has been lost as what can still be found.

When archaeologist M.J. O'Kelly surveyed the site in 1942 and 1943, he described a cluster of three forts sitting close beside one another at an elevation of 371 feet, or roughly 113 metres, above sea level. Ringforts, which were typically enclosed farmsteads built during the early medieval period in Ireland, are common across the landscape, but a trio arranged in such deliberate proximity on a single ridge was notable. The fort now catalogued as LI032-086 measured around 125 feet, or 38 metres, in overall diameter and was already in a heavily collapsed state at the time of O'Kelly's visit. A single stone rampart formed its boundary, though it had fallen so thoroughly that the original entrance could no longer be identified. Inside the enclosed space, O'Kelly noted a small, low semi-circular bank about 20 feet, or 6 metres, across, which he thought might represent the foundation of a former hut. The third fort in the line, the most easterly, was by then already gone, erased by quarrying that likely extracted the very stone that once formed it.

The outline of the surviving monument is visible on aerial photography, including images taken in January 2003 and held by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, which gives some sense of the enclosure's shape even where the physical remains are difficult to read on the ground. The hill itself, rising above the surrounding Limerick countryside, provides the vantage point that presumably made it attractive in the first place. Anyone visiting should expect collapsed stonework rather than upstanding walls, and the internal bank is low enough that it requires some attention to pick out. The most easterly fort, the one that once completed the trio, left no trace at all.

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