Ringfort (Cashel), Coill Bhaile Uí Fhlaithimh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On a ridge in Kerry's Dingle Peninsula, where the ground falls away on either side towards the Owencashla and Meennascarty river valleys, there sits an oval enclosure that has almost entirely dissolved back into the landscape.
A cashel is a type of stone ringfort, its boundary formed not by an earthen bank but by a dry-stone wall, and this one now survives only as a low spread of rubble, roughly a metre high and four metres wide, tracing an oval roughly 25 metres across at its longest. Where a modern field boundary wall has been built across the western half, the original structure has been absorbed into it almost without trace. No entrance survives in any identifiable form.
Inside the enclosure, a little north of centre, is the collapsed remains of a clochaun, a small beehive-shaped stone hut of the kind associated with early medieval settlement and monastic life across the Dingle Peninsula. This one measured about 4.3 metres in internal diameter, and its drystone inner wall-face can still be followed for most of its circumference, though nowhere does it stand higher than 35 centimetres. Like the cashel wall itself, it gives nothing away about where its entrance once was. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a landmark regional survey that catalogued hundreds of monuments across this unusually dense archaeological landscape.
What makes this site quietly compelling is how thoroughly it has returned to being ordinary pastureland. The ridge position would once have made the enclosure a legible feature in the terrain, something visible and purposeful above the two valleys. Now it requires attention to read at all, the stones of a small stone house within a stone enclosure within a working field, each layer of use having pressed a little further down on what came before.