Ringfort (Cashel), Ballynahown, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
A low knoll in Ballynahown, County Clare, carries a cashel, a type of early medieval stone-walled ringfort, that has been quietly accumulating misidentifications, overgrowth, and neighbours for well over a century.
The fort sits within a large field system and commands clear views across a broad arc from south-east to north-west, the kind of position that suggests its builders had reasons beyond aesthetics for choosing the spot. What makes it particularly curious is not just the structure itself but its context: within roughly 135 metres to the west-south-west there is a second cashel, and a mere 52 metres to the south-south-east lies a third, along with a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with storage or refuge in the early medieval period. Three such monuments clustered this tightly in a single landscape is unusual enough to prompt questions about how the community that used them was organised.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and described the site in 1905, recording it under the name Cahernagrian and noting an oval fort with walls built in two faces of large, well-set blocks, each over a foot thick, with small rounded stone used as internal fill. He also recorded five well-marked but irregular hut-enclosures within the interior. When the site was inspected again in 1998, the picture had changed. The cashel by then measured roughly 29 metres east to west and 25 metres north to south, with walls between 1.8 and 2 metres wide and standing up to 2.6 metres on the exterior face in places. Access was restricted to a stretch running from north-north-west to east-north-east, where stone had collapsed outward and down the slope. The southern and south-eastern sections of the wall had partly fallen or were visible only as a broad rubble bank. The five hut sites Westropp had noted were no longer visible, lost under vegetation. The name Cahernagrian itself had migrated on the Ordnance Survey maps: the 1915 six-inch sheet applies it to the different cashel 135 metres to the west-south-west, leaving this fort effectively unnamed on the historical cartographic record.