Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyelly, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballyelly, Co. Clare

On the north-western slopes of Slieve Elva in County Clare, a narrow shelf of ground holds the remains of a stone ringfort that looks out across a broad sweep of landscape from west-south-west to north-east.

What makes it quietly remarkable is not the structure in isolation but its context: the cashel sits within a field system spanning roughly eight square kilometres, and two further enclosures lie within thirty to sixty metres of it, one to the south-south-east and another to the north-north-west. A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, typically associated with early medieval farming settlements, and this cluster of them suggests a landscape that was once densely and deliberately organised.

The cashel itself is roughly oval, measuring about 16 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, enclosed by a heavily overgrown stone bank between 1.8 and 3.8 metres thick. Where the inner facing remains visible, particularly on the north-west, north, and south sides, it survives to between 0.6 and 1 metre in height. Against the interior of the south wall, the foundations of a roughly rectangular stone structure are still traceable. The interior is largely flat, with a slight rise in the south-east. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted this cashel and others in the vicinity in 1901, and the site was already marked with a solid line on Ordnance Survey maps from as early as 1842, suggesting it was a visible and recognisable feature of the landscape even then. The wider field system it belongs to is described as multiperiod, meaning the earthworks and enclosures accumulated across different eras rather than representing a single moment of activity.

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