Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyclogh, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyclogh, Co. Limerick

Some ancient sites demand effort to find; this one demands a different kind of effort altogether, the effort of imagination.

A ringfort once stood at Ballyclogh in County Limerick, on a south-facing slope with open views to the south and east, exactly the kind of commanding position that early medieval farmers and their families favoured when enclosing their homesteads within a circular earthen bank. Today, that enclosure sits within the car park of Limerick Golf Course, and by all accounts there is nothing left to see.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths or cashels depending on whether they were built from earth or stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, and thousands of them survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This one at Ballyclogh carried the designation "cashel", suggesting it may originally have been a stone-built enclosure rather than a simple earthwork. It was still recognisable enough in 1841 to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of that year, depicted as a circular enclosure with a diameter of roughly twenty metres, modest even by the standards of such sites. At some point between that survey and the present, the monument was lost entirely, absorbed or disturbed by later activity on the land. Denis Power compiled the record as it now stands, uploaded in March 2013, noting simply that the monument is no longer evident.

For anyone determined to visit, the location is the car park of Limerick Golf Course at Ballyclogh. There is no earthwork to inspect, no stones to read, no visible trace reported. What remains is the map evidence, the coordinates, and the knowledge that somewhere beneath the tarmac or the closely cut grass nearby, the ground was once shaped by hand into something that mattered to the people who built it. The 1841 OS map, freely available through the relevant online archives, is probably the most rewarding thing to look at in connection with this site.

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Pete F
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