Ringfort (Cashel), An Bóthar Breac, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), An Bóthar Breac, Co. Kerry

On the Ordnance Survey's first edition map, this site simply does not exist.

On the second, it was recorded as nothing more than a sheep-fold. What survives on the ground, however, is considerably more interesting than either cartographic note suggests: a stone-walled enclosure, roughly circular in plan, enclosing a small clochaun, set at the western edge of a wide stretch of moorland above the valley of the Owenalondrig river on the Dingle Peninsula.

A cashel is a type of early medieval ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, and this example measures approximately 18.5 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west. Its entrance faces south-east and takes the form of a short passage, somewhere between three and four metres long and about one and a half metres wide, lined on both sides by upright stone slabs. Inside the enclosure sits the clochaun, a small dry-stone corbelled structure of the kind found elsewhere across the Corca Dhuibhne landscape. Its walls are one and a half metres thick and still stand to around three-quarters of a metre in height, enclosing an interior just three and a half metres in diameter; its entrance faces east. The site sits in a transitional zone between the enclosed farmland to the south and the high mountain ridge to the north, which may partly explain why it slipped past the cartographers who first mapped the area, and why later surveyors downgraded it to agricultural infrastructure. It was documented more carefully by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, which drew attention to its probable significance as a cashel rather than a later field enclosure.

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Pete F
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