House - indeterminate date, Acres, Co. Kerry

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House

House – indeterminate date, Acres, Co. Kerry

At the eastern edge of Minard beach in County Kerry, a few metres from the cliff-edge, the ground holds the outline of a house that nobody can confidently date.

The walls survive to roughly three-quarters of a metre, built in the drystone manner, and the rectangular footprint they describe measures just under ten metres in one direction and four and a half in the other. What makes the situation stranger is that this house sits inside a bivallate cashel, meaning a roughly circular stone enclosure ringed by two concentric walls, and beneath or beside the structure there is also a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often thought to have served for storage or as a place of concealment. Other features were once recorded within the enclosure, but they are no longer visible on the ground.

The site carries the Irish name Cahernanackree, or Cathair na nAcraí, and it stands directly across from Minard Castle, a tower house whose own ruins occupy the western side of the same beach. The cashel and its interior structures were documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a detailed field study of the Corca Dhuibhne region. That survey recorded the house foundation as it then appeared, though subsequent research has revised some of the details. The enclosure is protected under the National Monuments Acts, which reflects both its fragility and the difficulty of interpreting what exactly was here. The absence of a firm date is not unusual for this kind of site; cashels on the Dingle Peninsula range across several centuries, and without excavation the internal structures rarely give up a precise period on their own.

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Pete F
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