House - indeterminate date, Ardagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
House
At Lismoyle, known in Irish as Lios Maol, meaning the bare or flat fort, there is a site that refuses to resolve itself into a single, legible thing.
What appears to be a domestic structure sits embedded within a ringfort, which itself sits immediately beside a second, older enclosure. The house, if that is what it is, was never finished, or was finished and then forgotten long enough that its date has become genuinely unrecoverable.
The ringfort here is a univallate cahir, meaning a roughly circular enclosure defined by a single stone or earthen bank, with an exterior fosse, a defensive ditch, running around the outside. The interior ground sits noticeably higher than the surrounding land, which is typical of long-occupied enclosures where centuries of habitation raise the floor through accumulated debris. Projecting from a low, curved rise on the western bank are the stone foundations of a roughly square structure, measuring approximately 8.6 metres by 8 metres, with walls around 1.4 metres thick. Out of the north-east corner of this structure, a slightly curved stone wall, about 12 metres long and a metre thick, runs northward into the bank itself. In the southern and south-western parts of the interior, two small semi-circular mounds, each roughly 1.8 metres by 1.5 metres, are folded into the bank in a way that suggests the remains of hut sites, small ancillary shelters of the kind that would have housed animals or dependants within the protection of the enclosure. The entrance, to the south-east, is about 4 metres across. The description of these remains comes from Catherine Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which catalogued hundreds of such sites across the region at a time when many were still being formally recorded for the first time.