Ringfort (Cashel), Ballygoonaun, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballygoonaun, Co. Clare

What survives at Ballygoonaun is not much to look at, and that is precisely what makes it worth thinking about.

A cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, once stood here as a roughly oval enclosure measuring around 37 metres east to west and 32 metres north to south. Today the wall has been reduced to intermittent fragments, its outer face only traceable along the eastern and south-south-western arc, with the most substantial remnant, no more than about half a metre high, surviving between the south-east and south-west. A modern north-south road has cut cleanly through the western side, removing whatever once closed the circuit there.

The site sits at the eastern end of a low ridge running east to west, set in low-lying pasture that forms part of a large multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it has been farmed and subdivided across many centuries, with boundaries from different eras overlapping one another. The cashel was only partially recorded on the 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, suggesting it was already well degraded by that point. What gives the site its quiet peculiarity is not its own condition but its company: two further cashels lie within striking distance, one approximately 100 metres to the north-west and another around 153 metres to the south-west. Three cashels clustered within a few hundred metres of each other in the same field system points to a density of early medieval settlement in this corner of County Clare that the current appearance of the land does nothing to suggest.

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Pete F
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