Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyconnoe, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyconnoe, Co. Clare

A road has quietly erased part of what was once a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort characteristic of early medieval Ireland, on a karst limestone plateau in County Clare.

The northern half of the enclosure is simply gone, severed by an east-west running road that left no visible surface trace of what once stood there. What remains to the south of that road is enough to read the shape of the place, though only just.

The surviving section sits on a gentle rise in rough pasture, part of a larger multiperiod field system that suggests this landscape has been managed, divided, and reworked across many centuries. The remnant is defined by a low scarp measuring roughly 20 metres east to west and just under 15 metres north to south, rising from 0.2 metres at its lowest to about 1.5 metres at its highest point to the south. It is there, at the southern end, that the cashel's original stonework is most legible: two to three courses of the outer wall-face survive for a stretch of around five metres, standing to a height of approximately one metre. The interior, where the enclosure once stood complete, remains level ground. Karst limestone terrain, formed by the slow dissolution of soluble rock, produces the kind of thin, stony soil and exposed pavements that are common across much of the Burren region, and it is this geology that both preserved the stone for construction and shaped the agricultural limits of the land around it.

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Pete F
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