Ringfort (Cashel), Ballygoonaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
What survives at Ballygoonaun is easy to miss, which is partly what makes it interesting.
In a stretch of flat, low-lying pasture in County Clare, a cashel, the term for a stone-walled ringfort, has been reduced to little more than a grassed-over ridge of rubble. The wall, where it can still be traced, rises only about thirty to forty centimetres above the surrounding ground. Outer stone-facing shows through intermittently, but a modern field boundary cuts straight across the monument from northwest to south, and to the west of that line no surface trace remains at all. The overall shape, where it can be read, is subrectangular, measuring roughly 32 metres north to south.
The site sits within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it carries the layered marks of repeated agricultural use across many centuries, possibly millennia. The cashel itself belongs to an early medieval tradition of enclosed farmsteads common across Ireland, though the exact period of its construction or use is not recorded. What the setting does make clear is that this was not an isolated structure. Two further cashels survive nearby, one approximately 100 metres to the southeast and another around 135 metres to the south-southwest, suggesting that this corner of the Clare lowlands once supported a cluster of enclosed settlements, each now at a different stage of erasure by time and farming. Together they form a quiet concentration of early activity in a landscape that, to a passing eye, looks unremarkably pastoral.