Ringfort (Cashel), Ballynabarney, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
On the north-east and east-facing slope of Annagh Hill, overlooking the long north-south corridor of the Wicklow Gap, a cashel sits half-forgotten within a coniferous plantation.
A cashel is simply a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank and ditch, and this one survives as a semicircular arc of drystone construction, measuring roughly twenty metres across its east-west interior. The wall itself, where it does survive, runs between one and a half and two and a half metres wide, and stands to about half a metre in height. The western to northern to eastern stretch of the circuit has been lost entirely, leaving what amounts to a parenthesis in stone rather than a closed enclosure.
Ringforts of this kind were the basic unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and were used as enclosed farmsteads by families of varying social rank. The cashel form was especially common in areas where stone was more readily available than the material needed for earthwork construction. Positioned on a hillside with a commanding view down toward the Wicklow Gap, a natural mountain pass that served as a significant route between Leinster's coastal lowlands and the interior, this site would have sat at a point of some strategic and pastoral value. Its current obscurity, buried within a planted forest that postdates any original use by centuries, makes the surviving arc of walling all the more quietly surprising to come across.