Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyshanny, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
A cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, sits on a low hillock in the undulating pasture of Ballyshanny in County Clare, its interior sitting noticeably higher than the surrounding ground.
What makes this one quietly odd is the difficulty of pinning down something as basic as where the door was. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited around the turn of the twentieth century and managed to contradict himself between two separate publications, placing the entrance at the east in one account and at the south, with steps leading down from it, in another.
The cashel is roughly subcircular, measuring just over 38 metres across its longer axis, and is defined by a double-faced stone wall approximately 2.2 metres wide. The wall stands to a more respectable height on the exterior, around 1.2 metres, than on the interior side, where only about 0.45 metres remain. Plinth stones, large flat-laid stones projecting outward at the base of the outer wall-face, are still visible, and at the south-east the ground has been cut away by roughly 0.4 metres at some point, exposing grey marl beneath them. A later drystone wall has been built directly on top of the original outer face, complicating the picture further. The site was recorded on both the 1842 and 1920 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and it sits within a broader multiperiod field system, suggesting long and layered use of this particular patch of ground.
Inside, the cashel holds two further features of interest. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or refuge, runs beneath the centre of the interior. Alongside it, in the north-north-west sector, are the visible remains of a house, though whether this dates to the cashel's original occupation or to a later period of use is not stated. An ESB electricity pole has been erected about four metres to the south-east of the souterrain, a reminder that even sites of this age get absorbed into the working landscape around them.