Ringfort (Cashel), Ballycahan, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
What makes this site quietly compelling is not any single dramatic feature but the way so many different periods of human activity have been layered on top of one another and left partially legible.
Sitting on a gentle south-east-facing slope of rough pasture and limestone pavement in County Clare, this subcircular cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort typically associated with early medieval farming settlements, measures roughly 52 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and 45 metres across. The views it commands are wide, though the monument itself is in a state of considerable fragmentation, its perimeter surviving in quite different forms depending on which side you approach.
The wall circuit tells a complicated story. To the west and north-west, an outer wall-face survives to about a metre in height, though its core and inner face are no longer clear. Elsewhere, a double-faced wall with a rubble core, nearly two metres wide, runs from the north-north-west around to the east, though only a single course of facing stones survives at most. Later straight field-walls have cut across the eastern and western stretches of the perimeter, though a broad footing beneath them, nearly three and a half metres wide, may represent the original cashel wall continuing beneath. A smaller enclosure or cashel intrudes at the east, effectively cutting into the earlier structure, and another cashel lies roughly 55 metres to the west, suggesting this was never an isolated settlement but part of a wider, long-used agricultural landscape. Inside the sunken interior, which sits around 30 centimetres below the surrounding ground, there is a small enclosure near the centre and, to the north-east, a souterrain. A souterrain is an underground stone-built passage or chamber, commonly found associated with early medieval ringforts and thought to have served for storage or refuge. A small hollow dug into the cashel wall at the north adds one more unexplained detail to a site that rewards careful reading rather than quick conclusions.