Ringfort (Cashel), Ballykinvarga, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballykinvarga, Co. Clare

A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and the example at Ballykinvarga sits quietly in rough pasture on a gentle north-facing slope, part of a broad landscape that has been divided, worked, and re-divided across many different periods.

What makes this particular site quietly instructive is precisely how much of its story can be read in the wall itself, or rather in what remains of it.

The cashel is almost circular, measuring roughly 27.9 metres east to west and 27.4 metres north to south. Its defining wall, originally around three metres wide, has been worn down substantially; the interior face now stands no more than 0.2 metres above ground level, while the exterior face survives to between 0.3 and 1.2 metres in places. The outer wall-face is traceable around most of the perimeter, and survives best on the western and northern sides. On the eastern and south-eastern arc, the wall has been robbed out over time, and the large limestone blocks that once formed its face, some up to 1.3 metres long and between 0.6 and 0.9 metres high, have slipped or been dragged to the foot of a low scarp. A later field wall was built directly over the cashel wall on the southern side, a small act of agricultural pragmatism that says something about how these ancient enclosures were gradually absorbed into the working landscape. The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan of 1897 and again on the six-inch edition of 1920. Within the interior, a subrectangular structure is visible in the north-west sector, though its date and function are not documented here. The cashel does not sit in isolation: a second cashel lies roughly 171 metres to the south-west, and an enclosure of some kind is visible approximately 193 metres to the south-south-west, together pointing to a concentrated pattern of early settlement activity across this part of County Clare.

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