Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyveloge, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
On a gently sloping field in Ballyveloge, County Limerick, a low circular bank of stone quietly encloses a patch of ground that has been accumulating history, and debris, for centuries.
The monument is a ringfort of the cashel type, meaning its enclosure is built from stone rather than the earthen banks more commonly associated with these early medieval farmsteads. It sits on a slight north-east-facing slope, just beside a second cashel immediately to its north-east, and what was once a defined boundary is now, according to a 2019 aerial image, heavily overgrown with trees.
The fort was recorded on Ordnance Survey maps under the name Knockanabausa Fort, a name that appears on both the 1840 six-inch map and the 1897 twenty-five-inch map, suggesting it was a recognised local landmark well into the nineteenth century. By 1897, the surveyors noted trees already planted within the interior, hinting that the site had by then long ceased to function as an enclosure and was being absorbed into the agricultural landscape around it. A post-1700 field boundary, the kind drawn up during later land reorganisation, cuts across the monument at the south and south-east, a common indignity for early medieval remains that happened to sit inconveniently across someone's later property lines. The stone bank itself survives, measuring roughly 29 metres across north to south, with an external height of about 0.85 metres and a base width of just over a metre, though the south-west section has been disturbed.
The interior today is uneven, the ground broken up by rubble gathered from field clearance over the years and deposited inside the bank. Visitors approaching across the pasture should expect a monument that does not announce itself dramatically; the bank is low, the overgrowth considerable. The site is most legible from above, which is how aerial survey has done most of the interpretive work here. Anyone wishing to get a clearer sense of the monument's shape and relationship to the adjacent cashel to its north-east would do well to consult the Ordnance Survey historical maps, which capture it before the trees fully closed in.