Ringfort (Cashel), Ballynahown, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Ballynahown, Co. Clare

A sheer rocky cliff looms to the north-east, and scrub crowds in from all sides, yet somewhere beneath the vegetation at Ballynahown lies the collapsed stonework of an early Irish cashel, a type of circular stone-walled enclosure typically associated with early medieval farming settlements.

What makes the site quietly odd is that the structure was already described as "quite overthrown" more than a century ago, and has been slowly disappearing into the landscape ever since, yet enough of it survives to reward a careful look.

When the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and wrote about the site in 1905, he recorded a ring-wall roughly 30 metres across, already largely fallen, and suggested it was "probably a bawn", meaning an enclosing defensive wall, often associated with later fortified houses, though the term was sometimes applied loosely to earlier enclosures of similar form. The cashel itself measures approximately 24 metres east to west and 21 metres north to south internally, defined by a bank of earth and stone roughly 2.5 metres wide. The 1915 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks it with hachuring, the conventional cartographic shorthand for an earthwork, and it was recorded as an enclosure in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. The site sits within a large ancient field system, and a second cashel lies only about 52 metres to the north-north-west, suggesting this was once a more densely organised agricultural landscape than the scrub-covered ground now implies. Tucked into the south-east quadrant of the enclosure is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge.

The wall is most readable where a cattle track has cut through the vegetation on the northern side, exposing a stone spread around 3 metres wide with an internal height still reaching 1.2 metres. Elsewhere, facing stones survive to varying heights around the circuit, most visibly on the southern and west-north-western sides. The limited view of the ocean to the west, glimpsed through rocky and overgrown terrain, gives a sense of how marginal yet purposeful this location once was.

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