Ringfort (Cashel), Ballykinvarga, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballykinvarga, Co. Clare

What makes Ballykinvarga quietly compelling is not any single monument but the density of them.

This cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, sits on a gentle north-facing slope in rough pasture, and it does not sit alone. Within roughly 150 metres, there are at least two other enclosures nearby, one a further cashel about 68 metres to the south-west, another an enclosure around 143 metres to the south-east. The whole area forms part of a large multiperiod field system, meaning that successive generations worked, divided, and reorganised this landscape over long stretches of time. What looks like open pasture is, in that sense, an archive written in stone.

The cashel itself is roughly circular, measuring just under 21 metres east to west and about 19.6 metres north to south. Its defining wall has been considerably reduced over the centuries; the technical term is denuded, meaning the structure has slumped and spread rather than standing to anything like its original height. Even so, the outer wall-face survives to around half a metre in places along the northern and eastern arc, and the wall itself was substantial when intact, between 3.8 and 4.6 metres wide. A secondary drystone wall, narrower and more poorly preserved, was at some point built directly over the outer face, running from the east around through the south and back to the north. This layering of construction phases is part of what makes the site archaeologically interesting, even in its reduced state. A possible entrance, about 2 metres wide, is identified at the east-north-east, where the wall spread behaves differently from the rest of the circuit and sits at the lowest point on the perimeter. The site was recorded on Ordnance Survey mapping as far back as the 25-inch plan of 1897 and again on the 6-inch edition of 1920.

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