Cahermore, Ballyconry, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
A field wall runs straight through the middle of one of Clare's largest early medieval enclosures, dividing it neatly between two farm owners.
That boundary is a fairly recent imposition on a structure that was already ancient when it was recorded in a rental document in 1380, where the townland appeared as 'Baile i chonradhi'. The cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, sits at the eastern end of a low ridge above the Shannon foreshore, and its sheer scale is still legible even in its current state of collapse.
The enclosure is roughly trapezoidal, with a rounded northern end, and measures approximately 76 metres north to south and 51 metres east to west internally, making it a genuinely substantial structure by any measure. What survives of the perimeter wall is a moss-covered spread between four and seven metres wide, rising at most to about 1.5 metres, with only scattered facing-stones still in position. The best-preserved section is along the southern outer wall-face, where a stretch stands to around 1.6 metres. At the north-northeast, a short stony bank may mark what was once the original entrance, now largely blocked. The site was mapped and named 'Cahermore' on the Ordnance Survey six-inch editions of 1842 and 1915, the latter showing it as an irregularly shaped area with a substantial wall, surrounded by a patchwork of small fields that have since been cleared away. Much of that cleared stone now sits piled outside the eastern wall, where the ground drops sharply by several metres.
The interior has largely been reclaimed by hazel scrub, thorn, and briar, which both obscures the archaeology and preserves it from further disturbance. Roughly 120 metres to the southwest lies a possible subcircular enclosure, suggesting that the broader landscape around Ballyconry may have seen more extensive early medieval activity than the surviving remains alone would suggest.