Ringfort (Cashel), Ballymahony, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
At the centre of this cashel in Ballymahony, County Clare, someone has been digging.
Two large C-shaped mounds of grassed-over spoil sit in the interior, and to the east of them a circular hollow about four and a half metres across drops roughly sixty centimetres into the ground. It is not the result of a collapsed souterrain, those underground stone-lined passages sometimes found beneath early medieval settlements, but rather the product of deliberate excavation, by whom and to what end remaining unclear.
A cashel is a ringfort defined by a drystone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one on its gentle south-facing limestone slope is a reasonably well-preserved example. The circular enclosure measures just under twenty-nine metres north to south and nearly twenty-eight metres east to west, its double-faced wall still standing around a metre high on the exterior. It appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1842 and 1920, which at least confirms it was visible and recognisable across that stretch of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The cashel sits within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape was being worked and reorganised across several different eras, and the relationship between the cashel and that broader system has accumulated layers of modification. A later field wall was built directly along the outer face of the cashel wall, effectively borrowing it, and several more modern field walls radiate outward from the structure at various compass points. A gap in the northwest is also modern. The result is a monument that has been continually incorporated into working farmland rather than left apart from it.