Metalworking site, Kimego, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Metalworking

Metalworking site, Kimego, Co. Kerry

What makes a site on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry quietly remarkable is not always what you can see, but what the ground has given up.

At Kimego, excavation of an early medieval enclosure turned up the residue of a working smithy: iron slag, tuyère fragments, and scraps of sheet bronze. A tuyère is the nozzle through which a bellows forces air into a forge, and finding pieces of one alongside slag places metalworking unmistakably at this spot. Add to that the quern fragments, the rotary or saddle stones used to grind grain, and the picture that emerges is of a settlement engaged in both craft production and ordinary domestic life, the kind of mixed-use activity typical of early Irish enclosed farmsteads.

The site is associated with a caher, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, and excavation focused on the area between the caher entrance and a hut structure within the enclosure. There, excavators uncovered a paved pathway of stone flags edged with low upright slabs, a carefully made threshold or passage that connected the entrance to the interior. The nearby site of Cahergal, another stone fort in the same area, yielded related finds: a pin sharpener and three fragments of a quern, objects now held in Kerry County Museum. The pairing of these two sites suggests a wider pattern of settlement and craft activity across this part of the Iveragh landscape rather than an isolated occurrence.

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