Mound, Mweevuck, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Within a low, overgrown enclosure in Mweevuck, Co. Kerry, two mounds sit quietly inside what appears to be an ancient cahir, a type of ringfort defined by a stone rather than earthen boundary.
What makes the arrangement quietly puzzling is not any single dramatic feature but the relationship between the parts: a sub-circular bank encloses an interior that contains not one but two separate mounds, an oblong one in the eastern sector and a smaller, almost perfectly square mound roughly eleven metres to the south-west, measuring just 1.4 metres by 1.4 metres on each side. That compact second mound, barely larger than a modest hearth, sits at an odd remove from its larger companion, and neither its function nor its origin has been firmly established.
The site lies immediately east of a place known in Irish as Lios na Daraí, meaning the ringfort of the oak, recorded in English as Lisnadarree. That name hints at a landscape that was once rather more wooded, and the broader area of north Kerry contains a notable density of such enclosures, each a remnant of the early medieval pattern of rural settlement in which a defended farmstead, typically circular and bounded by a bank and ditch, served as the basic unit of life and land-holding. The cahir here is described as univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than the multiple concentric rings that more elaborate examples sometimes display. The vegetation that has since taken over the site makes it difficult to read the ground clearly, which is itself a common fate for earthwork monuments that have passed out of agricultural use. The mounds inside were documented as part of C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995.