Ringfort (Cashel), Balleen, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ringforts
On a hillside in Balleen, County Kilkenny, there is a place that exists more thoroughly in old maps than in the ground itself.
This was once a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone enclosure wall rather than an earthen bank and ditch, and for centuries it sat slightly below the crest of a hill on the south-western side of a valley, looking out over the kind of open rolling grassland that early medieval settlers chose precisely for its visibility and defensibility. By the time anyone thought to record it formally, it was already disappearing.
The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map of 1839 shows the site as an oval enclosure. By the 1900 revision, it had been redrawn as more nearly circular, with a diameter of approximately 41 metres, and a field boundary running north-east to south-west had been incorporated into the south to south-eastern sector, the wall of the cashel quietly absorbed into the working geometry of a farm. When the site was visited in 1987, the enclosure had been levelled entirely. What survives is local memory: people in the area described it as having been defined by a stone wall of the same character as that at a comparable enclosure roughly 320 metres to the north-west, which still retains some physical presence above ground.
The cartographic record across those two Ordnance Survey editions tells a compressed story of how such sites are lost, not through any single dramatic act but through incremental agricultural use, a boundary here, a levelling there, until the feature is gone and only the maps remember its shape.