Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyinsheen More, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyinsheen More, Co. Clare

What catches the eye here is not any single dramatic feature but the sheer complexity of what survives in a field in County Clare: two concentric rings of dry-stone limestone walling, connected by at least five radial walls that divide the space between them into segments, with a modern quarry sitting less than fifty metres away to the north-north-west.

The site belongs to a class of early medieval enclosure known as a cashel, the stone-built equivalent of the more familiar earthen ringfort, and this particular example is unusually elaborate. Most cashels present a single wall; a bivallate cashel, defined by two concentric circuits, implies a site of some consequence, whether through status, defence, or a combination of both.

The inner wall, roughly circular and measuring about 36 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west, is built 2.6 to 3 metres thick using randomly coursed limestone. It survives best along its south-western and west-north-western arc, where several courses remain intact. Embedded within the rubble core at intervals are large upright slabs set perpendicular to the facing stones, a technique that lends structural integrity to the wall mass. On the eastern side, two such slabs stand 4.1 metres apart with a low mound between them, which may represent the original entrance, flanked by jambstones in the manner common to Irish early medieval enclosures. The outer wall, slightly more oval, spans approximately 68 metres east to west and 67 metres north to south, and also survives best at the south-west. Between the two circuits, the radial walls, each around 2 metres wide and half a metre high, survive from south round to north-east, though a modern sheepfold at the northern end may conceal another. The whole structure sits within a broader multiperiod field system, and later field boundaries, running in at least three different alignments, cut across both walls, layering centuries of agricultural reorganisation over the earlier monument.

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