Road - road/trackway, Caherdaniel, Co. Kerry

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Road – road/trackway, Caherdaniel, Co. Kerry

Near Caherdaniel in County Kerry, an old road does something quietly puzzling: it runs down to, and apparently beneath, a cashel.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, typically dating from the early medieval period, used as an enclosure for a farmstead or settlement. Roads, as a rule, go around such structures, or were built long after them. The fact that this one seems to pass under the cashel suggests that the sequence here is the other way around, that the road came first and the cashel was built across it, or at least that the two belong to quite different periods of use.

The observation comes from Barrington, writing in 1999, who noted the old road system in the area and its relationship to the cashel. No construction date for the road has been established, so the question of which feature is older, and by how much, remains open. The road is thought to be likely connected to what is now walked as the Kerry Way, a long-distance route that threads through this part of the Iveragh Peninsula, in some stretches probably following much older lines of travel across the landscape.

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Pete F
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