Structure, Beheenagh, Co. Kerry

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Utility Structures

Structure, Beheenagh, Co. Kerry

At Beheenagh in County Kerry, a cluster of small D-shaped and sub-rectangular structures clings to the walls of a promontory fort, most of them surviving now only as shallow depressions lined with tumbled stone.

What makes this grouping quietly puzzling is a disagreement between two sources separated by nearly a century: are there four structures here, or five?

The scholar Judith Cuppage, writing in 1986, described four or five such structures abutting the inner face of the fort wall, noting that the largest measured roughly 2.25 metres by 1.6 metres internally and reached about 1.2 metres in depth. A further D-shaped foundation sat outside the wall to the north of the southern entrance, its surviving walling still standing up to 0.4 metres high. A third depression on the opposite side of the same entrance was tentatively identified as a relatively recent sheep-shelter, the kind of improvised enclosure that farmers in Ireland built by taking advantage of existing ancient stonework. Despite mentioning four or five structures, Cuppage's own published plan shows only four. The fifth appears in an earlier source altogether: a plan drawn by P.J. Lynch in an 1899 article, which places an additional structure to the south of the southern entrance, abutting the outside of the promontory wall. A promontory fort, for context, is a defensive enclosure built where a headland or raised ground provides natural protection on at least one side, with a constructed wall sealing off the landward approach.

The discrepancy between Lynch's plan and Cuppage's count has never been fully resolved on paper. The structures are small enough, and the collapsed walling ambiguous enough, that matching the measurements on the page to the depressions on the ground would require careful inspection in the field. It is the kind of site where the archaeology asks more questions than it answers, and where the gap between a nineteenth-century sketch and a late twentieth-century survey quietly refuses to close.

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