Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyganner, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyganner, Co. Clare

What draws the eye at Ballyganner is not simply a ruined wall on a hill, but something more deliberately arranged.

The entrance to this early medieval cashel, a stone-walled ringfort of a type common in the west of Ireland, faces east, and from its narrow outer opening the passage widens after little more than a metre, drops by a step, then continues straight inward, flanked on each side by low stone piers projecting from the inner wall-face. Beyond that, a path of spaced kerb-stones leads westward to the centre of the enclosure, its far end marked out with stones as though to indicate arrival somewhere specific. The outer wall still presents a well-preserved face of large flat stones, standing between 0.8 and 1.3 metres on the exterior, and the whole structure measures roughly 31 metres east to west.

The cashel sits at the top of a broad hill in pasture, commanding wide views in every direction, and it does not stand alone in time or in space. Within the enclosure, the southwest quadrant contains a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind frequently associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, used variously for storage, refuge, or both. House foundations survive in the northwest quadrant. Attached to the exterior at the northeast is a separate enclosure, and a ramped entrance cut into the northwest, accompanied by spoil mounds, is thought to be a later addition to the original structure. The cashel also sits within a large multiperiod field system, suggesting the landscape around it was organised and reorganised across several centuries. A cairn, a stone burial mound, lies roughly 152 metres to the west-southwest. The site was already recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 and 1920, marked with hachures indicating an earthwork or enclosure.

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