Ringfort (Cashel), Ballykinvarga, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
What makes this corner of County Clare quietly remarkable is not any single monument but the density of them.
This cashel, a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, sits on a gentle north-facing slope in rough pasture, and it is far from alone. Within a radius of roughly 200 metres, at least three other cashels are recorded in the surrounding landscape, the nearest lying just 68 metres to the north-east and another approximately 80 metres to the south-west. Ballykinvarga cashel, the most studied of the group, sits around 185 metres to the south. The cumulative effect is of a place where early medieval people did not simply settle but organised themselves across the land in clusters, each enclosure perhaps belonging to a different family or grade of farming household within a broader community.
The cashel itself is circular in plan, with internal dimensions of roughly 25 metres north to south and just under 24 metres east to west, giving it a respectable interior space. Its enclosing wall, built in the dry-stone tradition without mortar, survives to a maximum external height of between 0.6 and 1.4 metres, though on the interior it barely clears the ground in places. The wall is around two metres thick at its northern section and can be traced, at least intermittently, all the way around the circuit. Like many such structures that have endured a thousand or more years of agricultural use, it has not survived untouched. Later dry-stone field walls have been built directly over the cashel's perimeter at the south-west and north-east, folding the ancient enclosure into the working fabric of successive farming generations. The cashel sits within what is described as a large multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it carries the layered traces of many different phases of land use, each generation rearranging or working around what earlier occupants had left behind.