Ballyvaghan Forts, Ballyvaghan, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ringforts

Ballyvaghan Forts, Ballyvaghan, Co. Clare

Just sixty metres from a tidal inlet on the Co. Clare coast, a low rise in the meadowland near Ballyvaghan carries the remains of four early enclosures that have been grouped together under a single name for at least as long as cartographers have been mapping this coastline.

The principal monument here is a rectangular cashel, a dry-stone walled enclosure of early medieval type typically associated with farmsteads or minor lordships, though this one has lost much of its original character. What remains is a wide, flat-topped bank of mixed earth and stone, roughly 35 metres on its longer axis and 29 metres on its shorter, with inner facing-stones still just visible along the north-west side. The whole thing sits overgrown and denuded, its outline more sensed than seen.

The 1842 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map recorded three of these features together under the label 'Ballyvaghan Forts', showing this particular monument as a circular enclosure, though by the 1915 edition the cartographers had revised its outline to subrectangular. The antiquarian T.J. Westropp, writing in 1901, extended the grouping further by including an exceptionally large cashel located roughly 180 metres to the north. That makes four monuments in relatively close proximity: this cashel, a second cashel about 70 metres to the south-south-west, an enclosure about 80 metres to the south-east, and Westropp's larger example to the north. Whether these were ever functionally connected or simply accumulated on suitable ground over time is not clear from what survives. A magnetic gradiometer survey was carried out in the surrounding field in 2007, and archaeological testing followed in 2008, but neither produced material directly related to the monument, and the geophysical survey did not cover the cashel itself.

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