Ringfort (Cashel), Ballinscoola, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
What you would likely walk past without a second glance turns out, on closer inspection, to be one of a pair.
At Ballinscoola in County Limerick, two cashels sit close together on a low limestone hill, their circular outlines absorbed so thoroughly into the landscape that one of them has nearly vanished altogether. A cashel is a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, typically dating from the early medieval period, when such enclosures served as farmsteads and defended homesteads for local farming families. Here, the more intact of the two survives as a collapsed stone bank roughly thirty metres across, its facing stones long since gone, its southern entrance only barely legible in the ground. The second cashel, immediately to the west, leaves almost nothing to read at all.
The site was recorded in the early 1940s by archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly, who described the better-preserved cashel as a circular space enclosed by what appeared to be a stone bank, already heavily deteriorated at the time of his survey. He noted that the hill on which both forts sit is divided by a system of ancient fences, suggesting the landscape around them carried its own long history of boundary-making and land division. O'Kelly estimated the overall diameter of each fort at around one hundred feet, or thirty metres, and judged the second to have been broadly similar to the first, though by his visit it had already been reduced to the slightest of traces. An aerial photograph taken in January 2003 under the Archaeological Survey of Ireland confirms that the outline of the surviving cashel remains visible from above, even where it resists easy reading on the ground.
The site is not signposted and there is no formal visitor access, so anyone hoping to locate it should come prepared with the relevant Ordnance Survey mapping and a reasonable tolerance for fieldwork in an agricultural setting. The low limestone hill on which the cashels sit is the kind of subtle rise that barely registers until you are standing on it. The surrounding field boundaries, some of which may themselves be of considerable age, are worth noting as context. Because much of what survives here is visible primarily as a grassy bank and disturbed ground, a low sun in winter or early spring, when vegetation is at its thinnest, gives the best chance of making out the enclosure's shape from within the field.