Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyelly, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyelly, Co. Clare

On the north-western flank of Slieve Elva in County Clare, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits on a slightly raised terrace, its outer wall still holding its shape after well over a thousand years.

What makes this cashel, a type of ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, quietly remarkable is not just its own survival but its position within a much larger picture. It sits inside a multiperiod field system extending across roughly eight square kilometres, and within a few dozen metres in almost every direction lie further cashels and enclosures, making this a corner of the landscape that was clearly organised, inhabited, and repeatedly reused across long stretches of time.

The cashel itself measures about 29 metres in external diameter. Its stone bank, between 3.1 and 3.6 metres wide, still stands to a height of 1.1 to 1.8 metres on the outside, though the inner face has been largely robbed out, its stones probably recycled for later building work. In the north sector, the remains of a rectangular structure abut the north-west wall, almost certainly the same feature that the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted in 1901 as the foundations of a late oblong building. Westropp also recorded the jambs of a north-wall gateway, some 86 centimetres wide, though these are now likely obscured. More intriguing is an exposed lintel in the north-west sector that covers a small opening roughly two metres long and less than a metre deep, possibly the entrance to a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval Irish settlement, used for storage or concealment. A circular hut once stood in the south-west of the enclosure, but no trace of it remains visible at ground level. The cashel appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as early as 1842, which at least confirms it was recognisable as an earthwork even then, and it was recorded again on the 1915 edition.

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