Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyinsheen Beg, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
In a field in County Clare, a low oval ring of tumbled stone sits so quietly in the grass that it could easily be mistaken for a natural undulation in the ground.
Only at the south-eastern arc does the wall hold enough shape to read clearly as something deliberately built. Elsewhere, particularly between the south-south-east and south-west, the line dissolves almost entirely into the pasture, leaving a visitor to trace its circuit more by instinct than by sight.
This is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort defined by a stone rather than an earthen boundary wall. Cashels are found across Ireland but are especially characteristic of the limestone landscapes of the west, where building stone lay close to the surface and earth banks were less practical. The interior of this example measures roughly 23.5 metres from north-north-west to south-south-east and about 16 metres across, dimensions consistent with a single farmstead enclosure of the early medieval period, though the site has not been dated precisely. What gives it additional interest is its setting: it sits within an extensive, multi-period field system, meaning the landscape around it carries the overlapping marks of land use across several different eras. The karstic limestone that pushes through the undulating pasture is characteristic of the Burren region, where thin soils and exposed rock have preserved ancient field boundaries that elsewhere were long ago ploughed away. Roughly 68 metres to the south-west lies a separate enclosure, and about 69 metres to the north-east, a sheepfold, the whole cluster suggesting a working landscape that accumulated structures gradually rather than being planned in a single moment.