Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyelly, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyelly, Co. Clare

On the high, west-facing slopes of a hill in Ballyelly, a roughly circular cashel sits within a landscape that has been worked and re-worked across multiple periods.

A cashel is a ringfort built of stone rather than earthen banks, and this one retains enough of its drystone wall to give a strong sense of its original scale: just over twenty-seven metres north to south on the outside, with walls reaching up to nearly four metres thick on the eastern side. The outer face still stands to two metres in places along the south-southwest, though much of it is obscured by collapsed masonry. The commanding views it offers, sweeping from the south-west right around to the north, would have made this a well-chosen location for whoever built and occupied it.

The cashel appears on both the 1840 and 1915 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, and the surrounding landscape is itself a layered document: an extensive multiperiod field system envelops the site, suggesting that the land here was being organised and divided long before and possibly long after the cashel was in active use. Within the enclosure, the eastern quadrant preserves the low foundation walls of a subrectangular structure of uncertain date, its walls butting up against the inner face of the cashel perimeter. A later wall has been built directly on top of this earlier feature, a small but telling detail about how the space continued to be used and adapted over time. A possible second structure may be indicated by a spread of stones in the south-southwest. More intriguing still is a narrow lintled gap in the north-northwest of the cashel wall, less than half a metre wide and just forty centimetres high, from which a shallow internal trench runs into the interior. This may be the remains of a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber that was commonly built beneath early medieval settlements for storage or refuge. Outside the cashel wall to the south-southeast, a structure now serving as an animal pen may originally have been a dwelling associated with the settlement, which would place ordinary domestic life just beyond the enclosure's edge.

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Pete F
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