Ringfort (Cashel), Ballykinvarga, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballykinvarga, Co. Clare

Two cashels sit within roughly sixty-six metres of each other in the undulating limestone pasture of Ballykinvarga in County Clare, and it is the lesser-known of the pair that rewards a closer look.

While the neighbouring Caherballykinvarga draws most of the attention, this smaller circular cashel, a stone-walled ringfort of a type common in early medieval Ireland, occupies its own slight rise in the same ancient landscape, quietly holding its ground beneath centuries of collapse and reuse. A cashel is simply a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one was substantial enough in its day, measuring roughly thirty metres across, with walls originally somewhere between four and nearly six metres wide.

What the site shows now is a palimpsest of different periods layering over one another. The original cashel wall is badly denuded, its interior height reduced to almost nothing along much of its circuit, though the wall-core still runs to nearly six metres wide at its thickest point. Sometime later, a drystone wall reaching up to a metre in height was built directly onto the outer face of the earlier structure, a common pattern of reuse in landscapes where good building stone was never wasted. A gap on the south-west side leads into a small subrectangular annexe, its walls collapsed and grass-covered, which appears to belong to this later phase of activity rather than the original cashel. Inside the enclosure, further collapsed walls suggest that at some point the interior was subdivided into a field system, adding another layer to the sequence. The site appears on both the 1842 and 1920 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, hachured in the conventional notation used for earthworks and enclosures. Roughly sixty-three metres to the south-south-west, a standing stone marks the same broad area, suggesting that this cluster of monuments was a place of some significance across several periods of use.

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