Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyganner, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
On a south-facing slope in County Clare, a roughly circular enclosure sits quietly within an extensive field system, overlooking a ravine with open views stretching east and west along an upland ridge.
It is the kind of site that looks, at first glance, like little more than a grassy mound with a tumbledown wall, yet it preserves the outline of a cashel, a ringfort built not from earth and timber but from stone, a form of enclosed farmstead common across Ireland during the early medieval period.
The structure measures just under twenty-six metres across in both directions, making it a modest but coherent example of its type. What survives is a spread of stone, three to four and a half metres wide, buried now under grass and scrub, with the outer wall-face visible only intermittently as a single course of large flat stones running from the south-south-west around to the north-west. At some later point, a drystone wall was added along the northern arc, presumably to keep the enclosure useful for agricultural purposes long after its original function had been forgotten. The site appeared on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1840 and again on the 1916 revision, marked with the hachuring used to indicate earthworks, and it was formally recorded as an enclosure in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996.
The interior is now overgrown, and modern gaps in the perimeter, one to the north-east, one to the west-north-west, and a third to the south-east that appears to serve as an entrance for livestock, mean the cashel has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape around it. The stone is still there beneath the vegetation, patient and largely unexamined, in a field system that itself has its own separate archaeological record.