Caherhone, Spunkane, Co. Kerry

A caher is a stone-walled ringfort, typically of early medieval date and built without mortar, and this one, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books as "Cathair Chon", was already described as "remains of" by the time the second edition of the OS map was produced. That annotation tells its own story. The site measures roughly 25 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, forming an irregular oval, and what survives of the enclosing wall stands to an external height of around 1.2 metres in places, though it has been rebuilt in sections and now takes on an oddly angular shape at its south-east and south-west corners that almost certainly reflects later interference rather than any original design.

The interior is largely buried under field clearance material, the kind of accumulated stone and debris that generations of farmers piled up simply to get it out of the way, and the site has also been used as a rubbish dump. Most of the wall's inner face has been lost entirely, with only a possible surviving stretch at the north, where the wall appears to be around 3 metres wide, built from a rubble core faced on both sides with irregularly shaped slabs and boulders laid in rough courses. What lifts the site out of mere ruin, however, is a cluster of upright slabs in the northern half of the interior. Local information suggests these may be connected to the site's secondary use as a ceallúnach, an informal or unconsecrated burial ground, often used in Ireland for unbaptised infants or others excluded from consecrated church cemeteries. The repurposing of an older enclosure as a ceallúnach was not unusual, and it adds a layer of social and religious history to a structure that might otherwise read simply as a damaged ringfort.